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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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The Buzz from Prairie Moon Farm

By Laura Johnson Andrews

The Freemans of Prairie Moon Farm include (from left) Harry, Willa, Elena, Grace and Harrison (not pictured).

Grace Freeman might be one of the calmest people we’ve ever met. Nothing seems to faze the Clay County beekeeper. When a mouse jumps out of the brome at her, she doesn’t blink. If she’s posing for a picture with a chicken and the bird leaves a deposit on her shirt, it doesn’t erase the friendly smile from her face. Put her next to a hive with thousands of stinging insects, and she’s happy as can be.

A Cincinnati native, Freeman fell in love with beekeeping in 1985 through a work-study job with an entomologist at the University of Montana.”We would go and collect bees and study them to see if they had picked up pollutants,” she says. When she and her husband, Harry, moved to Madison, Wisconsin for grad school, Freeman worked for a large-scale beekeeper, managing up to 1,000 colonies. After Harry took a job in the psychology department of the University of South Dakota, the couple settled in a farmhouse on Frog Creek Road, where they have lived for 21 years with their children, Elena, Willa and Harrison.

The Freemans’ home, Prairie Moon Farm, is a back-to-the-lander’s Eden. Chickens and guinea fowl roam freely, a trio of penned-up rescue llamas provide manure to fertilize her garden and scare away deer, and a friendly dog named Saige welcomes visitors. There’s a shed full of kayaks for paddles on the Missouri, a greenhouse and a small but fragrant structure where Freeman creates tinctures and blends herbs for teas she sells at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market.

Freeman’s hives are in a little glade a short walk away from the buildings, past a pond and a stand of honeysuckle bushes. She puts on her veiled beekeeper’s hat and sets the smoker filled with smoldering brown paper scraps and wood chips on the ground. The smoke fools the bees into letting their guard down, making it less likely they will sting.”They think there’s a fire and they have to travel,” Freeman says.”They fill up on honey, and get so full that their stinger goes down.”

When working with bees, Freeman recommends wearing white or light-colored clothes.”Bees get angry if you wear dark colors,” she says.”It reminds them of bears.” And be sure to tuck in your clothes.”You don’t want them crawling in your shirt,” she tells us. Some beekeepers wear a protective suit and gloves, but after decades of working with bees, Freeman has developed a more casual style — a long-sleeved white shirt over a tank top and shorts.

Freeman uses Langstroth hives, which consist of a stack of wooden boxes, each of which contains hanging wooden frames upon which the bees build their comb, raise young and store honey. The supers, shallower boxes at the top of the hive, will hold harvestable honey. The queen, the brood and the colony’s food storage all go in the deeper, lower boxes. A metal rack called a queen excluder separates the two portions of the hive. The rack’s slats are big enough to allow worker bees to pass between sections, but keep the larger queen down in the brood cells where she belongs. After all, no one wants bee eggs mixed in with their honey.

Freeman inspects a frame from one of the hive’s supers. She harvests honey in late summer.

The hive’s lid is stuck on tightly with propolis, a gluey yellowish-brown substance that bees make from tree resins and beeswax. Freeman uses a mini crowbar called a hive tool to break through the glue and help manipulate frames as she checks on the bees and their activities.

The queen is the only female in the hive that mates and lays the fertilized eggs that develop into worker bees, so Freeman looks for fresh eggs to make sure the queen bee is doing her job.”Eggs change every day,” she says.”If you can see the one-day-old eggs, then you know you have a viable queen. Even if it’s a two-day-old egg, something could’ve happened to her.”

Bee society is fascinatingly complex and overwhelmingly female. The only males are the drones. They have no stingers and do no gathering — their only job is to be available to mate with a virgin queen bee. After mating, they die. The worker bees, all female, cycle through a series of roles — foraging, building, housekeeping, childcare, attending the queen, guarding the hive. There are even mortuary bees, who haul the colony’s dead away from the hive. With so much to do, it’s no surprise that the life of a worker bee is short. During the busy spring and summer seasons, they might live a brief four to six weeks.

Under most conditions, bees manage themselves, but there are critical points during the year when a beekeeper should pay attention. In spring, Freeman helps the bees get ready for the season, making sure that they have food to last them until the flowers really start blooming and that there’s plenty of space to make new honey. In June, when the clover blooms, she watches for signs of swarming.”If you haven’t provided them with enough room, then they’ll divide,” she says. The bees will create a second queen and fly off in search of a new hive, leaving the old queen with a few guards for protection. A divided colony means less honey, so Freeman destroys any potential new queen cells she spots.

Once the fear of swarming is over, Freeman’s bee work slows down a bit. When the bees fill up the existing frames, she adds supers. Honey is harvested in August.”Then they have time in the fall to put on enough winter weight so you don’t have to feed them so much sugar water,” Freeman says. After that, it’s time to winterize the hive.

Winter and early spring are tricky times for beekeepers. Freeman lost one of her two colonies last spring due to uncertain weather.”I can get them through until March and then the temperature warms up and they start moving more — they get excited,” she says.”Moisture builds up, the temperature drops and they freeze. I have really been trying to figure out how to ventilate and still keep them warm enough.”

In a good year, Freeman harvests 50 to 100 pounds of honey per hive, selling it at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market along with garden plants, culinary and medicinal herbs, teas, tinctures, salves and lip balm made from her own beeswax. When she’s not gardening, marketing or beekeeping, she works as a registered nurse. How does she juggle it all?”Oh, I’m not very good at it,” Freeman says.”We’re always busy. My summers are just nuts.”

But no matter how crazy life gets, the bustle of the hive serves as an oasis. Bee stings hold no fear, and the sounds of the hive have a calming, meditative effect.”For me, it’s very relaxing to have that noise going all around you, all the bees flying,” she says.”It’s very loud, but you’re focusing so hard on looking for those eggs that you don’t even hear them, and it gets very peaceful.”

Meloamak·rona (Honey-dipped Cookies)

Honey is a major component of Greek cooking. Freeman’s husband, Harry, who is half-Greek, makes baklava and meloamak·rona, or honey-dipped cookies, using recipes found in a community cookbook from his mother’s hometown, Seattle.

Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup salad oil

6 tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon fresh
orange juice (divided)

Grated peel of one orange

2 eggs

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3 teaspoons baking powder

6 to 6 1/2 cups sifted flour

Nut Topping

1/2 cup very finely chopped nuts

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon cloves

Honey Syrup

2 cups honey

1/2 cup water

In large bowl of electric mixer, beat butter until light and fluffy. Add oil slowly and continue beating for 10 minutes. Gradually add sugar, 1/2 cup orange juice and peel. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat an additional 5 minutes.

Combine 1 tablespoon orange juice and baking soda; add to butter-oil mixture. Add baking powder and enough flour to make a soft dough. Remove beaters; knead slightly to make a dough that does not stick to hands, adding more flour if necessary.

Roll a heaping teaspoonful of dough into an oval-shaped cookie, tapering the ends slightly. Press the melomak·rona lengthwise with fork tines to make indentations to hold the nut topping. Bake at 375 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Remove cookies from baking sheet and cool on wire racks.

Mix ingredients for nut topping and set aside.

When cookies have cooled, bring honey and water to a boil. Dip melomak·rona into honey syrup, being certain to thoroughly soak the cookies. Sprinkle tops with nut topping.

From Greek Cooking in an American Kitchen (Makes about 5 dozen)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2018 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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School for Snowshoes

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Snowshoes and other traditional crafts are preserved at the Four Winds Boat Shop near Vermillion.

Students are welcome in the refurbished schoolhouse nestled into the hills of Dawne and Matt Olson’s farm near Vermillion. But instead of grammar and geography, these students are learning to make boats, pine needle baskets, fishing flies, wing bone turkey calls, snowshoes and other traditional crafts.

Dawne Olson came to woodworking through her love of the outdoors. After seeing a cedar strip canoe under construction at a canoe museum, she bought a book on canoe building and decided to try it, even though she had no prior experience.”I literally propped the book up in my shopping cart while I wandered around the store trying to find the tools that were recommended to use, even though I had never heard of half of them,” Olson says. She picked up additional books and peppered an online boat-building forum with questions. By the time Olson had a finished canoe, she was hooked. She opened Four Winds Boat Shop in 2015, in part so that she could help others feel the sense of satisfaction that comes from developing a new skill.”When I finished my third year of snowshoe workshops, one of the participants sent me a picture of her completed snowshoes,” Olson says.”She said, ‘I can’t remember the last time I was this proud of myself.’ I love that so much.”

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

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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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Terry’s Domain

By Jerry Wilson

Terry Hill builds domes where his clients live, from wide open pastures to tree-encircled homesteads.

During the Vietnam War, Terry Hill made himself a promise. If he got home, he would do for the rest of his life what he could enjoy. He’s kept that promise.

That doesn’t mean just sitting by the fire with a guitar in his hands, or building boats and floating the Missouri River, though those are among his favorite things. It means that the work he puts his hands to will be creative work, work without a boss, work in which he can take pride.

In Clay County, where he lives when a job or other fun doesn’t take him elsewhere, many have seen an unglamorous room of their home transformed by Terry’s hands. But it is for something more unique that he is known. He is South Dakota’s foremost builder of one-of-a-kind domes.

But don’t call him up and order a new dome for occupation in the spring. Terry isn’t about to hire a crew and advertise for jobs. He works alone most of the time, works his own hours — which may be well over eight — and has other priorities than finishing by a certain date.

The seed of dome building took root in Terry’s mind when he was a student of Dick Termes, the famed creator of Termespheres in Spearfish. If you’ve been to Deadwood’s Saloon No. 10, you’ve seen a spherical double of the historic establishment’s interior rotating above the bar. Termes’ sphere that encapsulates in one continuous scene Lewis and Clark’s voyage up the Missouri hangs in the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre.

But back to Terry Hill. Two things happened when he was a student at Black Hills State University in the early 1970s. Termes and others brought famed engineer and building designer Buckminster Fuller, the father of the geodesic dome, to Spearfish.

Terry Hill has built dozens of homes, ranging from relatively temporary and primitive structures to large, elaborate homes.

Terry had seen pictures of Fuller’s grandest dome, the United States pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Exhibition. Now he heard Fuller speak, and wandered through the dome that had been temporarily erected on campus. Terry would never be the same.

Then Termes decided to move inside a sphere. He asked Terry to build him a dome.

South Dakota’s most famous dome, USD’s Dakota Dome in Vermillion, is visible from the window of the dome where Terry lives. Terry has a personal connection to the sports arena. In 2001, steel replaced the Dakota Dome’s synthetic fabric roof that had kept football and basketball players dry for over 20 years — except for its second year, when the roof ripped under a load of snow. The fabric was repaired, but many yards of good material was up for grabs, and Terry got a share. He still takes inspiration from floating the Missouri River in the canoe he built and covered with a scrap of Dakota Dome roof.

But from an engineering standpoint, the Dakota Dome is a simple structure compared to Terry’s dome. It’s an icosahedron. Of the many domed homes Terry has built, no two are alike. What would be the fun in repeating a creative act when other challenges lay ahead? But an icosahedron?

“It’s one of the Platonic solids,” Terry explains,”one of the five three-dimensional shapes that have the same angles on all the faces.” He launches into an explanation of variations of the dome, but soon it is apparent that it would be simpler just to build one than try to make me understand. Tetrahedrons, four sides with equilateral triangles, I comprehend, since that sounds something like the more conventional house in which I live. But trying to visualize dodecahedrons, which have 12 sides and every face a pentagon, is another thing.

Terry tries again:”An icosahedron is a 20-sided Platonic solid, one of the natural forms Plato described 2,400 years ago. Lots of life forms, like crystals, are Platonic solids.” The bottom five facets of Terry’s house are missing, of course, replaced by a flat floor. So the walls and roof of his house consist of a mere 15 equal triangular sides.

Yankton native Ed Johnson and his wife, Michelle Martin and their family live in another Clay County dome that Terry built. They were living in Pocatello, Idaho, where Ed worked as a psychiatric nurse, when they saw the chance to move home to South Dakota.”Actually this was 25 years in the works,” Ed said as we lounged in the late afternoon light on his front steps.”When we lived in Pocatello, Terry came out and built a domed sauna for us. Johnny Dome Seed. I was always going to move back, and I knew that when I did, I wanted Terry to build a dome.”

We go inside for a look. This dome is larger than Terry’s, 40 feet in diameter. I marvel at the construction, but still struggle to visualize how such a house is put together.”Here,” Terry says,”I’ll show you.” He digs in his wallet for a well-worn card with three sets of numbers: A: .3486-10%; B: .4035-12%; C: .4124-12%.

The skeletal frame of one of Hill’s creations.

“So that’s all you need to know to build a dome,” says Ed, for whom Terry also built smaller domes for a guesthouse and a sauna. His roaring laugh tells me I’m not the only one in the dark.”I’m good at carrying things,” Ed adds.

“This is for a three-frequency dome,” Terry continues, as if he’s mixing so many eggs with so much milk and flour to make a cake.”There are three struts. This number times the radius in inches will give you the length. The 10 percent is the angle of the bevel at the end of the strut.”

Terry sees that conveying abstractions is hopeless, and like a good teacher, he resorts to show and tell. We step inside Plum Lodge, Ed and Michelle’s guesthouse. The interior of this 24-foot dome is unfinished, which makes construction techniques easier to grasp. In the open space I realize two other marvels of domes: They seem much larger inside than out, and they amplify our voices; we unconsciously adjust them down.

To talk about domes requires setting aside conventional assumptions about buildings, concepts like walls and roof. It’s like asking where a snake’s neck ends and its tail begins. Terry explains that”geodesic” means the shortest line between two points, and that a dome is built by connecting many points to form the many facets of the surface. I observe that every facet in this dome has either five or six sides — pentagons and hexagons — but even with evidence before my eyes, I’m glad I won’t be tested on the information that A struts radiate from the centers of pentagons, B struts are their border, and C struts radiate from the centers of hexagons. I did build my own house, but my mind takes refuge in straight walls, where the ideal corner is 90 degrees. My eyes glaze over and Terry gives it up with a laugh.

Talk about job security. Everybody admires Terry’s work, but few will take the challenge.”But I’m not advertising,” he reminds me.”I’m not looking for work.”

Both Terry and Ed are artists and musicians, and both speak of the calming feeling they gain from living in homes without corners or straight walls.”I don’t really think about it,” Ed says,”but I feel it. I had a good feeling when I first stepped into Dick Termes’ dome a quarter century ago, and I’d wanted one ever since.”

Ed speaks of the naturalness of round structures, the sacredness of the form in Native American cultures, which he thinks grew from reverence for the dome of the Earth. And in fact, Terry’s domes are far from the first in South Dakota. Centuries ago the Arikara lived in domed earth lodges along the Missouri, and Native dwellings from Lakota tipis to Inuit igloos to Navajo hogans are round.

In the more than three decades since he strolled through Buckminster Fuller’s dome, Terry Hill has built and lived in several of his own, once wintering in a dome that consisted of a parachute stretched over a lath frame.”It served well, actually,” he said. Most of his domes are far more substantial; he has built them as far away as Alaska, but most are in South Dakota.

In the winter of 1976, Terry, his wife and their newborn daughter were living in a primitive cabin near Custer.”There was a dome book in the cabin, which I was reading, and there were a bunch of little dead trees on the property, so I cut them down and made a little dome for a sauna,” he recalled.”That gave me the idea that I could actually build a dome to live in, so the next year I built a dome on my mother-in-law’s land west of Custer, and we lived there a couple of years.” Later, when Terry worked as a logger near Rochford, he lived in a primitive 12-foot dome he built near his work site, which he said was more comfortable than the winter he spent in a tipi near Deerfield Lake.

Word of Terry’s domes spread. Dick Termes called his former student and asked if he would build a domed studio next to his dome home near Spearfish. Another friend asked Terry to frame a dome for him near Nemo. He built one at Little Eagle on the Standing Rock Reservation, where in the absence of electricity he used a chain saw to frame the structure. The next he built near Fairbanks, Alaska.

In 2002, he began a large dome near Rochford, for Lucy Gange, an Eagle Butte native who is a professor at the University of North Dakota, but considers the Hills her home. The pair designed the house together, and each summer they built another phase.”Terry is the builder,” Lucy said.”I hold the dumb end.”

Hill built one of his signature domes for Spearfish artist Dick Termes, creator of the Termesphere.

This is the tallest dome Terry has built, four levels from the into-the-hillside ground floor to main floor to loft to reading cupola on top. Light filters through kaleidoscopic triangular stained glass windows, custom made by Carol Ellison of Rapid City. A pitch pine tree stands in the middle, now at the second level with lots of room to grow.”One thing I like about Terry is that he’s willing to incorporate what’s important to me,” Lucy said.

In an era when big crews frame a conventional house in a week, building a dome — especially the way Terry Hill builds them — is a different story. When Ed and Michelle decided to build, they found a long-abandoned farmhouse in a thick grove of trees in Clay County. Ed and Michelle were both working fulltime, so Terry mostly worked alone. But before construction on the 28-foot-tall dome could begin, Terry needed lumber.

Instead of calling the lumberyard, Terry disassembled the old farmhouse, a fine home that, judging by the inscription he found on a structural board, was built by Peter and Edwin Hesla in 1913, but was uninhabited for 50 years. Terry also tore down a deteriorating barn, and even salvaged lumber from the farmhouse where he grew up south of Wessington.”It was a little farm with cows and pigs and chickens, the kind that doesn’t exist now,” Terry said.”My folks moved to town, and the new owner was going to burn the house down. I said, ëGee, I’d like some of that lumber.’ So my old house lives on.”

“There’s even a sink in here from Terry’s family’s house,” Ed said.”And when we were building, we’d look up and there was a section of different-colored wood, like a patchwork quilt, and Terry would say, ëYeah that piece came from so and so.'”

Ed and Michelle’s 40-foot dome sits on a 32-foot, round concrete basement wall; the floor of the dome is cantilevered 4 feet out, giving the dome the appearance of a giant mushroom. Ed and his family moved in when the shell was finished, and the interior work continues. But in the meantime Terry built them a barn, a greenhouse and two more domes — the guesthouse, which Michelle dubbed Plum Lodge for the plum grove by which it stands, and a 12-foot sauna, also of recycled wood.

Most people these days are in too big a hurry to fool with recycling lumber. Once an old building is torn down, there are nails to pull. Some pieces will be damaged, so the lumber will not be uniform. But Terry prefers building with recycled wood. He’s not in a hurry, he likes reusing what would otherwise be burned or thrown away, and the quality of 50-year-old boards is generally superior to what is available today.”Plus I buzzed off about a hundred thousand logs in my lumbering days in the Black Hills,” he said.”I’ve got to atone for that.”

“Is there a downside to domes?” I asked.

“It’s definitely more work,” Terry said.”There are lots of angles. You can build a cube much faster.”

And besides not having big flat walls to hang oversized art on, are there drawbacks to living in a dome?

“I can’t think of anything,” Ed said.”I can even get my exercise in winter, power walking around the perimeter.”

Terry conceded that while domes are easy to heat, they’re harder to cool than conventional homes if exposed to the sun, because they have lots of surface to heat up and no attic to vent heat away. But Ed and Michelle avoided that problem by building amidst big ash trees that surrounded the old farmhouse their dome replaced.

Between domes, Terry still does conventional building and remodeling, but he’s happiest when conceiving and building a dome. He loves the beauty, the strength and the feel of the form, but he also likes knowing that for the material used, no other structure provides as much uplifting living space.

One other potential problem though. Without corners, where do spiders hang out?

“Don’t worry,” Ed said.”They find a place.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Dunlap Melons

By Janet Dunlap Rathbun

On Dunlap Melon Day, Sept. 12, 1926 in Vermillion, 22,000 melons were piled and sold by 5 p.m. An estimated crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 people attended.

We had five seasons in Clay County: spring, summer, watermelon, fall and winter.

My grandfather, Jim Dunlap, began shipping melons from Vermillion as early as 1912. There have been several other colorful watermelon growers in the area. Grandpa earned his crown as the watermelon king in the 1920s when he cultivated 145 acres on the Missouri River bottoms.

For royalty, he worked very hard. In those early years, he walked two miles to his fields. In later years he rose at the crack of dawn, got in a truck, picked up the field hands, and drove down to the fields.

He came back exhausted. After our evening meal he would walk out on the front sidewalk, with his head raised toward the clouds (if there were any) and pray for rain.

In 1930, it was very hot and dry. His daughter, Lenette, told me, “For six weeks it didn’t rain a drop and each day Dad would say that he didn’t see how the melons could live much longer without rain. He would go down in the morning and the vines were all fresh and perky and looked good. He would go back in the evening and they looked withered and dead.”

James and Abbie Dunlap in 1935.

Finally, rain came on August 18. “Dad had one of his best melon crops,” Lenette recalled. “The roots kept going down for water and everyone thought the melons were sweeter that year than they had ever been.”

Lenette and her sister, Mary, enjoyed their father’s Melon Days promotion and his watermelon feeds. “Of course, the free feed was to entice people to drive down to the grove to buy melons to take home,” Mary said. “We had planks for a big, long table, probably 30 feet long, and behind the table were three or four men with machetes and these men would reach back in the pile of melons, put a melon up on the table, and slash it into slices.”

Grandpa Dunlap also sold rail car loads of melons to area towns for big feeds. The Milwaukee Railroad once paid him $265 in damages for a shipment that was not packed in ice. When that happened and the weather got hot there would be watermelon juice all over the train.

Rail companies eventually learned to use an open stock car so the melons could get air, but there was still a downside: Opportunists carved out pieces of melon along the way.

On Melon Days in the Great Depression, our family sold surplus melons for $2 a carload. Drivers came with the seats removed from their cars so they could squeeze in more melons.

”They would pile melons into their cars until they were practically falling out and then they would try to drive up the hill to get back on the road,” Mary said. “Many of them did not have the power to do this so they would have to stop, unload some melons, put them on the ground, drive their car up to the road, run back and get the melons, stick them back in their car, and then they would go on their way.”

Anna Bruce, a Lesterville farm girl, came to board with the Dunlaps so she could attend classes at the university. She didn’t know our family grew melons.

On her first day in town, she had a date. She and her friend met some other young people and somebody suggested that they swipe a melon.

A neighbor alerted Grandpa by telephone. “Dad walked down (to the patch), and as he approached the youngsters he struck a match to see the face of the person nearest to him,” Mary said. “To his surprise, it was Anna Bruce.”

Rather than embarrass Anna, he told all the young people to meet him back at his house.”I don’t know what he said to them,” Mary said. “But he gave them a watermelon to eat.”

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

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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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Restaurant Renaissance

Our September/October issue includes a story on Vermillion’s downtown restaurants. The college town’s hungry citizens have historically enjoyed little culinary variety. There have always been burger joints, and University of South Dakota students thrive on the chicken wings from Leo’s. But the scene began to change a decade ago, and Vermillion is now home to some of South Dakota’s most popular locally-owned restaurants. Bernie Hunhoff’s photos accompanied the story of Vermillion’s restaurant renaissance. Here are a few that didn’t make the magazine.