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John Banvard’s Brush with Success

By Ried Holien

John Banvard in an 1849 portrait.

When John Banvard died in Watertown in 1891, newspapers throughout America and Europe ran his obituary, though it was hardly the kind of attention the town fathers might welcome. Most of the media wondered how it came to pass that one of the 19th century’s wealthiest and most renowned artists could die penniless in an American frontier town.

John Banvard achieved international success by fulfilling a boyhood dream of creating the largest painting ever. That might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but when completed, his Mississippi Panorama stood 12 feet high and stretched 3 miles in length. Known to the world as The Three Mile Painting or Banvard’s Grand Panorama of the Mississippi, Banvard’s canvas depicted nearly 3,000 miles of riverbank, from the mouth of the Yellowstone River on the upper Missouri all the way to New Orleans.

In marking his passing, the Watertown paper printed that Banvard was, “one of the greatest men the world ever saw, and by his genius and skill has made himself so famous that his name will go down in history as such.”

That prophecy proved less than accurate; as a matter of fact, Banvard’s name is scarcely known today. How his boyhood dream transformed his life from rags to riches is a great American success story. How the man fell back to rags is a story all his own.

John Banvard was the youngest of 11 children, born Nov. 15, 1815, to a prosperous immigrant family in New York City. It was the family’s custom to read literature aloud at the dinner table; while still in his highchair, Banvard could recite lengthy poems.

His father died in 1831. On top of that tragedy, his father’s business partner absconded with all the family assets. When the destitute family headed to Boston to live with the eldest son, Banvard headed west to seek his fortune.

Only 15 at the time, he found work at a Louisville drug store, but that didn’t last long. Banvard was fired after his boss discovered him entertaining his fellow workers by drawing caricatures of their employer on the store walls.

Deciding there was a lesson for him in that experience, Banvard started traveling the Mississippi River system seeking jobs as an itinerant artist. He painted portraits, decorated public buildings, and for a short time worked as a scene painter on the first Mississippi Showboat. The last especially taught him skills that would be indispensable for his later work. He learned a quick brush stroke, how to work from sketches and painting on a grand scale.

Banvard claimed the colossal panorama idea came to him on his first trip down the river. Later, writing about himself in the third person for a promotional pamphlet, Banvard described his experience. “The boy resolved within himself to be an Artist, that he might paint the beauties and sublimities of his native land … His grand object was to produce the largest painting in the world.”

Another story lists patriotism as Banvard’s motivation. In 1840 he read a foreign critic who wrote, “America has not the artists commensurate with the grandeur and extent of her scenery.” Loyally, Banvard resolved to prove the critic wrong.

The truth probably was that Banvard recognized the panorama’s growing popularity, and knew his skills matched such painting. So he bought himself a skiff, some paper and pencils and floated downstream with the strong Mississippi current, sketching all the while.

Banvard brought his panorama to England, where he shared it with Queen Victoria and her royal entourage.

“He would be weeks together without speaking to a human being, having no other company than his rifle, which furnished him with his meat,” said one account of his journey. “Several nights he was compelled to creep from under his skiff, where he slept, and sit all night on a log and breast the pelting storm. The sun the while was so intensely hot, that his skin became so burned that it peeled off the backs of his hands and from his face. His eyes became inflamed by such constant and extraordinary effort.”

Needing room to accomplish what he had in mind, Banvard started painting in a Louisville warehouse. In order to view his enormous creation, Banvard invented a mechanical device consisting of two tall cylinders attached to either end of the canvas. By hand-cranking these cylinders, the panorama scrolled from one side to the other. To prevent wear, the canvas was not unwound between performances, meaning a customer could sail down river at one performance and head north against the current at the next show.

Banvard’s machine used an upper track system that prevented sagging and kept the top tight. This device was such an improvement over existing technology that Scientific American devoted a lengthy article to describing its function.

Upon completing his work, Banvard rented a hall and advertised the unveiling. But nobody showed up. Undaunted, he passed out free tickets along Louisville’s docks to the next evening’s show. Steamboat crews and dock workers marveled at the panorama’s accuracy, and they spread the word in every saloon along the river. The Great Three Mile Painting was showing to full houses by the end of the week.

After a profitable run in Louisville, Banvard headed to Boston. There, after 15 years apart, he was reunited with his family. His homecoming was made all the sweeter when Bostonians flocked to see the show.

Panoramas were the television documentaries, epic cinemas, travelogues and National Geographic specials of their day. That explained the city’s enthusiasm for Banvard, according to Dr. John Hanners, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the artist. “The New Englanders’ scarcity of knowledge about the West gave such knowledge as there was a peculiar appeal, and Banvard … was hailed as a contributor to the artistic, educational and scientific knowledge of the age.”

So genuine was Banvard’s painting that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote descriptively of sailing down the Mississippi in his epic poem “Evangeline” without ever seeing the river. He gleaned all the information needed by attending Banvard’s show.

At certain times Banvard admitted school groups in free, which gave the panorama educational and family appeal. Others who never attended mass entertainments started filling Banvard’s hall.

In Boston, Banvard perfected his onstage delivery, narrating on stage as the panorama passed behind him. He lectured on science, explained each scene, and told amusing anecdotes. One critic wrote, “Take the artist from the painting, and you take away one of the principle attractions.”

An illustration from the Dec. 16, 1848 issue of Scientific American explained Banvard’s scrolling machine.

Unreeling the panorama required two hours. Banvard often expanded shows to three hours or longer depending upon audience reaction. One performance stopped completely when a St. Louis businessman jumped up and shouted, “That’s my store! Hallo there, captain! Stop the boat! I want to go ashore and see my wife and family!” The merchant later admitted he believed, at that instant, he was sailing through St. Louis.

As an added attraction, Banvard composed waltzes that a pianist played during shows. His first accompanist was a Boston merchant’s daughter named Elizabeth Goodnow. On May 17, 1848, the two were married.

Money poured in. Every night’s revenue was placed in a specially designed strong box and protected by security guards. Banks refused to take time counting the money, and accepted the strong box by weight only.

After a performance before the largest audience in Boston theatrical history, Banvard left for New York City. The Three Mile Painting received an equally enthusiastic response there. Unfortunately, Banvard noticed that the constant scrolling had created cracks in the paint. So, he painted another panorama ó a near identical copy.

Banvard then sailed for England, where British audiences adored his colorful American stories told in his strange accent. While there Banvard also befriended London’s elite, including Charles Dickens. In April 1849, he gave a command performance for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. He considered it the highlight of his career.

Even the normally staid London Times heaped adulation on the visiting American: “Mr. Banvard has done more to elevate the taste for Fine Arts than any single artist since the discovery of painting and much praise is due him.”

By this time, Banvard was probably the richest artist who ever lived, and his success spawned hundreds of imitators. Rivals infiltrated art students into shows to have them sketch the panorama. Later, they painted copies from these drawings. Several other London halls advertised the original Mississippi Panorama, but without modern copyright laws, Banvard could do little to defend his work.

Banvard left England in 1850 to travel through Egypt and the Holy Land. From his sketches he completed two more panoramas. One imitated sailing up and down the Nile, while his second depicted the Holy Land on a canvas over 1,000 feet long and 48 feet high. Both were profitable, but neither matched Banvard’s original success.

A homesick Elizabeth persuaded Banvard to return to New York in 1852. He built a mansion on Long Island, and called it Glenada, after his daughter Ada.

Banvard started a museum on Broadway that featured his panoramas and legitimate theater, writing many of the plays himself. Unfortunately, this venture proved disastrous.

Unlike the panorama’s economic simplicity, the museum required that he deal with hundreds of employees, lawyers and business partners, and Banvard was unequal to the task. Throughout the 1870s, he failed at several other entertainment endeavors. Finally, he lost everything in the Panic of 1877. Creditors seized Glenada and auctioned off his possessions.

His fortune gone, Banvard again headed West. In 1880, he moved in with his eldest son, Eugene, a Watertown lawyer.

Banvard remained active in Watertown by writing. He wrote one of the state’s first books, on how to learn shorthand in a week. He became South Dakota’s first published poet in 1885 with “Tradition of the Temple,” one of over 1,700 poems he composed in his lifetime.

Banvard’s great-grandson, John Banvard, visited the family home in Watertown in 1981.

That same year, Banvard targeted his muse to a political cause. Under his pseudonym, Peter Pallette, Banvard penned a poetic plea to spare the life of Native American activist Christopher Riel.

Some neighbors became offended at their local celebrity choosing unpopular causes. They produced another poem, supposedly written by Riel himself. In it the activist pleads for death to avoid having to read more bad verse. The “Riel Reply” appeared in the Watertown Daily Courier on Aug. 17, 1885:

For Pallette comes with Banvard’s muse

to fend me in such verse

That I in haste the gallows choose

the poetry’s far worse!

Banvard later learned his neighbors wrote the fake reply, but despite this unpleasant incident, the family thrived in Watertown. Eugene’s business prospered, while his father cultivated friendships with town leaders, including Governor Arthur Mellette.

Banvard supervised construction on Watertown’s first armory, a building of some local importance. “With the state’s National Guard based near Lake Kampeska, (the armory project) proved quite a responsibility,” says Joanita Kant Monteith, director of the Kampeska Heritage Museum. The presence of Civil War veterans and an active ladies’ auxiliary in the area added even more visibility to the project.

Banvard also gave public lectures on such things as how to read hieroglyphics, which he claimed he had learned to decipher while in Egypt. His lectures always drew good attendance.

His greatest project in Watertown was a grand attempt to regain his fortune with another panorama. The Burning of Columbia depicted the South Carolina capital’s destruction by General Sherman’s troops in the Civil War.

According to Doane Robinson, longtime secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, this last panorama exhibited Banvard’s great showmanship. “Painted canvasses, ropes, windlasses, kerosene lamps, shutters, and revolving drums were his accessories,” Robinson recalled. “Marching battalions, dashing cavalry, roaring cannon, blazing buildings, the rattle of musketry, and the din of battle were the products, resulting in a final spectacle realistic beyond belief.”

Banvard, then 71, ran everything himself. Years later, Robinson put the performance into context. “I have read of the millions expended in the production of a single modern movie,” he said, “but when I remember what John Banvard accomplished in a spectacular illusion in Watertown, Dakota Territory, more than fifty years ago for an outlay of ten dollars, I am rather ashamed of Hollywood.”

The public loved The Burning of Columbia. The young territory simply lacked the population base to make it the success Banvard wanted. With his family fearing for his health, Banvard finally retired from the stage for good.

In 1889, Elizabeth died; a bereft Banvard followed on May 16, 1891, and was buried at Watertown’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

Soon after the funeral, Eugene ran into financial difficulties and the family left town without notice. Creditors once again auctioned off the Banvard family possessions.

No Banvard ancestor lives in the Watertown area today. But in 1981, John Banvard of Bolger, Texas, visited Watertown, searching out information on his once famous great-grandfather. The grandson didn’t hold his ancestor’s artistic ability in high regard, though. “We have three or four of his paintings,” he said, “and frankly, they’re so bad we wouldn’t put them up on the wall.”

Critics have long debated John Banvard’s artistic merit. Dr. Hanners disagrees with even judging it as art; he says the shows were more theatrical. Banvard himself said he didn’t, “exhibit the painting as a work of art, but as a correct representation of the country it portrays.” The public, not Banvard himself, thrust the title “artist” upon him.

Joanita Kant Monteith believes Banvard should be remembered as an excellent example of American ingenuity, “a showman the caliber of P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill. They took great American shows to Europe.”

In a way, John Banvard’s legacy suffered from his own success. By blending moving pictures with words and music, Banvard laid the groundwork for a new art form: the cinema. When the public embraced motion pictures, they forgot what came before.

In 1943, the navy commissioned a Liberty Ship called the USS Banvard. Banvard’s daughter, Edith, christened the ship. During the dedication he was proclaimed, “The first motion picture producer.” During its three years of service, the USS Banvard encountered several mishaps. Like the Banvard family possessions, the government sold the ship as scrap.

The fate of the Three Mile Painting remains a mystery. One grandchild remembers playing on it as a child. In 1948, Edith Banvard said, “As to what became of the panorama which my father painted, I cannot say with any certainty. I always understood that part of it was used for scenery in the Watertown opera house.”

Local legend says Banvard’s Grand Panorama was shredded for use as insulation in local houses. If thatís true, then the largest painting in the world, like its creator, still resides in South Dakota.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1997 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Road Less Traveled

By John Andrews

Motorists driving state Highway 20 see the steeple of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church on the horizon for several miles before reaching Hoven.

South Dakota Highway 20 passes through nearly two dozen East River towns between Minnesota and the Missouri River. Only four have more than 300 people. Motorists often choose U.S. Highway 12 through Aberdeen or U.S. Highway 212 through Watertown when traversing the state’s northeastern quarter, so Highway 20 has become less traveled. The route could be considered one of our most rural highways, and it’s worth exploring. We found 200 year old pianos, South Dakota’s only pressed flower artist, legends of a prankster Indian chief, Civil War history (Union and Confederate) and new businesses injecting life into small towns.

Minnesota to the Big Sioux

Our journey began in Grant County, where Minnesota Highway 40 becomes South Dakota 20. Between the state line and Watertown, the road weaves around rolling hills dotted with huge boulders that could only have been left by glaciers that scraped the earth thousands of years ago.

The first stop was Steve Misener’s piano shop on the Main Street of Stockholm, population 105. Misener began tuning and restoring pianos 30 years ago, and since then he’s become an avid piano collector and passionate music advocate. He has about 75 pianos and boxes stuffed with miscellaneous parts packed into his small shop, which was once the town grocery store.

Steve Misener tunes, restores and collects antique pianos in his Main Street shop in Stockholm.

His most prized pianos are two John Broadwood concert grands with connections to famous European composers (see sidebar). He also owns French and German pianos made in the mid-19th century and smaller square grands. One was made by Jonas Chickering in Boston in 1832, and may be the oldest privately owned Chickering. Misener knows of four others of that age in existence. They are at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Misener jokes that he’s the first member of his family to pursue a career outside of agriculture in 100 generations. At age 13 he bought a player piano at an auction and became fascinated with its parts. After graduating from high school in Revillo, he attended technical school for piano tuning and repair.”I found out the ratio of pianos to piano tuners, and 35 years ago it was 5,000 to one,” he says.”There were 5,000 pianos out there with my name on them.”

The ratio may still be the same, but times have changed.”Seventy percent of the pianos in American homes today are furniture,” he says.”You set your family pictures on them and no one plays them.” He also read a study that found only 7 percent of Americans play an instrument. Those factors motivated Misener to revive interest in music by having students tour his shop and exhibiting a portion of his collection at Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin last spring.

One morning 15 students enrolled in a music theory and history class visited his business. When he asked how many played an instrument, only three students raised their hands.”My generation has taught convenience,” he laments.”It’s much easier to spend 60 seconds and learn how to run an iPod than it is to spend six years and learn how to play the piano.”

Misener hopes to take his exhibition on the road to reach as many students as he can. He also welcomes tour groups. Call (605) 676-2355 to make sure he’s there.

In South Shore we met Tina Nielsen, owner of the South Shore Mercantile. Her business is the hub of activity in the town on the south shore of Punished Woman’s Lake. The Mercantile is a grocery store, hardware store, thrift shop, restaurant, video rental, library and gift shop all under one nearly 100-year-old roof.

Nielsen and her husband opened the mercantile three years ago as a small grocery store that served rolls and coffee in the morning.”The people accepted us, and we’ve expanded to fit their needs,” she says. And the townspeople have helped by donating freezers, shelving, cabinets, tables, chairs and decorations for the walls.

Nielsen also helped revive the town’s traditional Punished Woman’s Pageant, held in 2010 for the first time in nearly a decade. It commemorates the story of Wewake and her lover Black Bear, both of whom were slain by the tribe’s jealous chief. When homesteaders settled the area in the 1880s, they found stone effigies of Wewake and Black Bear on a hill south of town. Nielsen says they plan to stage a pageant again in two years, but for now a video of the 2010 event is available at the Mercantile.

There’s a brief break in Highway 20 north of Watertown. The route resumes on the city’s west side and loops around Lake Kampeska. It also passes the apex of the triangular Lake Traverse Reservation.

Big Sioux River to the James

West of Watertown, corn and bean fields pockmarked with countless lakes and sloughs dominate the landscape. This is the oldest stretch of Highway 20, which opened in 1929 between Watertown and Highway 45 near Cresbard. In 1944 the highway was extended through Hoven to U.S. Highway 83. In the 1950s a stretch to the Minnesota line was added, and in the 1960s it overtook what had been Highway 8 to Montana. In all, Highway 20 spans 432 miles.

Every town along Highway 20 has an elevator, though Bradley’s is long abandoned.

Grain elevators are prominent in nearly every town from Watertown to the Missouri. Through the wheat belt of Spink County, huge elevators sometimes stand alone. Grain bins greet travelers in Florence, a town rebounding from a devastating fire in June that destroyed an elevator that Terry Redlin used as the backdrop in many paintings. We stopped for root beer at Max Johnson’s Pioneer Cafe, then walked down the block to the elevator’s temporary office where Steve Schlenner was checking markets. Schlenner has managed the Florence elevator for 27 years, and it was he who discovered the fire. Construction crews working on remodeling had left for the day, and Schlenner was running wheat around the large elevator complex when he saw smoke.

“I knew right away it was going to be all gone,” Schlenner says.”I just knew there was no way we would be able to save it. I looked up the chute, and for just a brief second I thought about going up there with a fire extinguisher, but I realized I’d never get it out. It was just a ball of fire. So I dialed 911, and I knew then it was all going to go.”

During our visit, crews busily repaired two adjacent grain bins, and Schlenner said the elevator hoped to be ready to handle the fall’s corn harvest.

Eight miles down the road lies Wallace, birthplace of U.S. Senator and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, though the sign announcing the town’s claim to fame no longer stands along the highway. In Wallace we met Marie Ann Robinson, the state’s only pressed flower artist. She gathers flowers, leaves, fruits and vegetables from her yard and creates award-winning pieces of art.

She showed us a sample of her work. In a Black Hills scene, a flowing waterfall is made from onion membrane, and the rocks are mushrooms. In another, the wooden walls and floor of a weathered building are day lilies. Robinson explained that after they die and are rehydrated, lilies develop a deep brown color and resemble wood grain when pressed. Her interpretation of Henri Matisse’s Woman With a Hat uses peony petals, poinsettia and white poplar leaves. Robinson’s popular South Dakota series includes pheasants, mallards, geese, buffalo and a work in progress featuring wild turkeys.

Marie Ann Robinson turns flowers and plants that grow around her Wallace home into works of art.

To prevent deterioration, the art is secured with aluminum tape and sealed beneath a layer of Mylar and two pieces of glass. Oxygen absorbers and silica gel packets remove any moisture, so any changes in the botanical material won’t be noticeable for decades.

In the early 1990s, Robinson was arranging wreaths and working with live flowers when she found a lily of the valley pressed in the pages of her grandmother’s Bible. She learned about pressing flowers and began making small bookmarks and magnets (some are for sale at Watertown’s Expressions Gallery, where you can also buy originals or prints of her larger pieces). Then a friend gave her a book on pressed flower art, and she expanded into bigger pieces. She joined an international pressed flower art guild on the Internet, and learns many of her techniques from Russian and Ukrainian artists, including a new framing method that is similar to vacuum packing the art within the frame.

Robinson has lived in South Dakota since 2002, but still speaks with the slight Southern twang she developed growing up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. She and her husband, a Webster native, lived on an acreage near Clark, where she tended 12 flower beds and a large vegetable garden. But a few years ago she decided to downsize. The flower patch at her Wallace home is considerably smaller, but she still finds what she needs around town and by exchanging materials with fellow artists.

We passed through Bradley and Crocker before arriving in the smallest town on our journey. Just five people live in Crandall, but an old gas station and its summertime music festivals has brought over 3,000 people to town since Dave Swain bought it in 2005. The Pumps was a full-service Standard station opened in 1934 to serve townspeople and passers by on Highway 20, which once ran right past the station (today the road is gravel, and Highway 20 passes 3 miles south of Crandall). When it closed in 1971, it was the last Standard station in the country to use gravity pumps. Standard wanted to include the pumps in a museum exhibit after the station’s closing, but owner Ben Hildebrant produced receipts showing he owned them, and they stayed.

The station was a popular stopping point for motorists traveling from Aberdeen to Watertown. Gov. Sigurd Anderson and Hildebrant were good friends, and the governor often visited. It was also the site of weekly poker games.

Swain opens The Pumps every other Sunday during the summer. There’s no gas, but he sells ice cream, candy bars and pop and displays memorabilia from Crandall’s heyday. One old photo shows the entire town boarding a train for Aberdeen in 1911 to see President Taft. In honor of the 100th anniversary next year, Swain is planning a celebration.

The Pumps is also home to music jamborees, usually one in the spring and another in early autumn. Musicians set up outside and Swain serves a light lunch.

Crandall lies near the western foothills of the Coteau des Prairies, a flatiron-shaped rise across eastern South Dakota. Today giant wind turbines dot the horizon; hundreds of years ago it was a popular gathering place for Indians. Burial mounds and remains of fire rings lie in the hills just north of town. Chief Drifting Goose and his Hunkpati band of Yanktonai were headquartered near here at Armadale, an island in the James River four miles northeast of Mellette that the meandering river has since re-submerged. He’s remembered as a peace-loving chief who preferred pranking homesteaders instead of fighting them. Legend says he once stole the clothes from a settler and made him run back to his sod shanty naked. When railroad surveyors marked the line through his encampment, he moved the stakes. Eventually the railroad was routed through Northville, a more respectful 10 miles west of Drifting Goose’s camp.

Dave Swain bought Crandall’s old Standard service station in 2005 and hosts summer gatherings there. The gas is long gone.

Locals tell Drifting Goose stories with a chuckle, but they also respect the leader who never signed a treaty and, in his mind, never ceded any of his land. No markers commemorate the colorful chief, but Swain is leading efforts to rename the bridge that crosses the James on Highway 20 after Drifting Goose.

When we left The Pumps, we followed Swain through Conde and his hometown of Brentford to tiny Plainsview Cemetery on a narrow, dirt road northwest of town. A few years ago Swain was exploring the cemetery when he found a single, white tombstone that read,”Corp. George W. Melton, 45 Va. Infantry, Co. E, CSA.” After some research, Swain discovered that Melton is one of less than 10 Confederate soldiers buried in South Dakota. He learned that Melton and fellow Confederates Jeremiah Houseman (buried in Mellette) and William Henry Carrico brought their families to Huron from Carroll County, Virginia in 1884. Melton and Houseman both served in the 45th Virginia, while Carrico fought under famous rebel Jeb Stuart at Gettysburg.

The rediscovery of Melton’s grave has led to another mystery around Brentford. Every Memorial Day, an unknown visitor places flowers and a Confederate flag by the tombstone.

The James to the Big Muddy

Highway 20 beyond the junction with U.S. Highway 281 honors another veteran. Cecil Harris grew up near Cresbard, a tidy town in northeastern Faulk County. Harris joined the Navy in 1941 and became the second highest scoring Navy pilot in all of World War II. He once shot down four enemy planes while saving two of his squadron members. Twice more he shot down four planes without taking a single bullet. Harris returned to Cresbard after the war to teach, and eventually became principal at the high school. He rejoined the Navy during the Korean War and served as a career Navy officer. He died in 1981 in Washington, D.C. The state transportation commission renamed the 80-mile stretch of road through Spink, Faulk and Potter counties after Harris in 2009.

Brad and Joletta Naef operate Dakota Jo’s cafe in Tolstoy. They serve German food once a week to honor the town’s heritage.

The Harris Highway took us through Onaka and into Tolstoy, where a California couple has opened a new eatery in the town of 36 people. Brad and Joletta Naef moved to Tolstoy in 2009, and last summer they converted the town’s old post office into Dakota Jo’s Cafe. Joletta grew up on a farm four miles northeast of Tolstoy, but Brad is a California native. He was a paint contractor and did light construction, and Joletta managed dental offices. When they retired they wanted a slower pace of life. Their cafe fills a need in Tolstoy and a handful of surrounding small towns.

“We were looking for something to do locally, and she remembered coming to town to the old cafe, so we asked the locals if they’d like a place to meet for coffee in the morning,” Brad says.”And it snowballed into a full cafe. We’re not like Denny’s or IHOP. We don’t even have a deep fryer. We cook like we do at home.”

That means German food in honor of the town’s heritage every Thursday, hot beef combos on Wednesdays, Mexican Tuesdays and a full family dinner on Sundays. The cafe is decorated with items from their home in California; his mother’s plates and her grandmother’s tin can art adorn the walls. They revel in the solitude they have discovered in Potter County.”Where we came from, you’d have bars on the windows and alarms all over,” Brad says.”I used to wake up two or three times every night. Now she can’t shake me awake.”

The spires of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Hoven loomed high above the horizon for miles before we passed through town. West of Hoven, U.S. Highways 83 and 12 join Highway 20 on its final jaunt through East River. Next to a cornfield south of Selby we found the Bangor Monument, a tribute to the town that was Walworth County’s seat from 1884 to 1909, when it was moved to Selby.

Rodney and Sheryl Stroh converted Selby’s old Amoco service station into a gift shop and restaurant.

Tall cedar trees surround the century-old grand brick courthouse in Selby. On the southeast corner of the courthouse square stands a monument to Capt. Newton Kingman, a Civil War veteran and one of Selby’s founders. Kingman placed two Civil War cannons on the square, but they were melted during World War II. In 2000, Justin Randall raised money to buy a replica cannon and placed it atop a brick and concrete pedestal. The project earned him an Eagle Scout badge.

We met Justin’s mother, Sheryl Stroh, at Dakota Maid, one of Selby’s newest businesses. Stroh and her husband Rodney operated a gift shop in the basement of their home but soon ran out of space.”I knew the gift shop wouldn’t support itself if we rented a building,” she says.”So then we thought we’d do a coffee shop and maybe a few panini sandwiches.”

They bought the town’s old Amoco service station along the highway in 2009 and created Dakota Maid, which has become a full service restaurant, coffee shop and gift store featuring South Dakota made products, like Valiant Vineyards wine and chocolate from the Watertown Confectionery.

Beyond Selby, Highway 20 winds through the grassy mounds of the Missouri River valley and through Mobridge, our final destination. It crosses the Missouri River near its confluence with the Grand River and continues west, through the Standing Rock Reservation and ranch country before ending west of Camp Crook. We heard there’s a unique town market in Trail City, that the country between the Grand and Moreau rivers includes some of the state’s best scenery, and that if you pass the Castles of Slim Buttes in just the right light, they resemble medieval ruins. That’s a trip for another time.

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

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The Golden Oldies

By John Andrews

Donus Roberts, pictured in his Watertown bookstore, coached speech and debate for 39 years at Watertown High School.

Search online for books about South Dakota and Barnes and Noble yields nearly 3,000 results. Amazon returns 30,000. Google produces 30 million. With so many books to read about your favorite state, how do you select the titles that best explain South Dakota and its people?

We’ve narrowed your choices down to about a dozen with help from Watertown bibliophile Donus Roberts. Roberts retired in 1999 from Watertown High School, where he spent 39 years as an English teacher and became one of the most highly decorated debate coaches in the nation. He is a man who loves words and ideas. He’s also an avid book collector, amassing over 15,000 titles in his personal collection and offering another 18,000 for sale at his shop in the East Point Plaza on Highway 81 and online.

Do not feel limited by Roberts’ list. Hundreds of authors have told South Dakota’s story in their own way, and their books are worth reading, but Roberts calls these”the golden oldies.” Some titles are available in bookstores or online, but others are out of print. Check each book’s availability at your local library.

Robert Karolevitz

Challenge: The South Dakota Story

Robert Karolevitz was one of South Dakota’s most prolific authors. He wrote 37 books and thousands of magazine articles and newspapers columns from his home at Mission Hill, northeast of Yankton. He enjoyed poking fun at himself, and was known for his sense of humor (evidenced in books called Everything’s Green But My Thumb, and Toulouse the Goose, a collection of off-the-wall columns). But Karolevitz also wrote histories of Yankton, the Catholic church in South Dakota, newspapering, Douglas County and a biography of Harvey Dunn. Roberts believes Karolevitz’s most lasting contribution is Challenge: The South Dakota Story.

“There are no comprehensive histories of the state that have been written in recent times,” Roberts says.”All of our histories were written some time ago. I think it’s one of the best interpretations of a state because it’s not sequential. It’s more thematic.”

Challenge, published in 1975, is one of the few histories written by a native South Dakotan. Karolevitz was born at Yankton in 1922 and lived all but 15 years of his life in Yankton County. His book describes 10 challenges people faced in settling and living here: conflicting cultures, the Missouri River, gold, Wounded Knee and the Dirty Thirties are among them.

Karolevitz struggled to identify his audience and the book’s organization. Challenge was originally intended for use as a junior high level textbook, but he adapted it for all ages. He also selected a topical rather than chronological approach”to emphasize and expand the why as well as the what of the unfolding saga,” Karolevitz wrote in the book’s introduction.”This labor of love is offered with the hope that it will generate native pride in The Challenge State and provide a realistic textbook for studying the heritage of a bountiful land — where the bounty is seldom attained without a struggle.”

Ole R¯lvaag

Giants in the Earth

Ole R¯lvaag’s classic Giants in the Earth, an enduring tale of Norwegian immigrants trying to conquer the Plains, follows Per Hansa and his wife Beret as they homestead in eastern South Dakota in the 1870s. They encounter drought, grasshoppers and blinding blizzards that bring tragedy.”It’s not only one of the great frontier novels,” Roberts says.”It belongs in the top rank of novels written in America. If you want to be well read about the Upper Midwest, Giants in the Earth is a must read.”

But had R¯lvaag listened to his father, Giants in the Earth, published in 1927, may have remained a seed in his imagination. R¯lvaag was born in 1876 on a small island of the northern coast of Norway. He walked 14 miles round trip over rocks and moors to attend school, but he was forced to stop at age 14.”His father finally told him he was not worth educating,” wrote Lincoln Colcord, R¯lvaag’s colleague who helped translate the novel from Norwegian to English.

R¯lvaag embarked on a life of fishing, but he became a voracious reader. He spent two days traveling by foot to a nearby village just to get a copy of Ivanhoe. He dreamt of writing a novel as early as age 11, but never seriously embarked on a project until he attended school in South Dakota 15 years later.

Rather than spend his life as a fisherman, R¯lvaag asked an uncle living in South Dakota for help getting to America. One day a ticket arrived, and R¯lvaag spent three years farming near Elk Point. Friends urged him to attend school, but his father’s admonition still rang clearly in his head. Still, R¯lvaag wanted a life of farming even less than fishing, so in 1899 he enrolled at Augustana Academy in Canton.

He quickly discovered that he felt most comfortable in school. After graduation he attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., and eventually became the school’s professor of Norwegian studies. His sequel to Giants in the Earth, called Peder Victorious, appeared in 1929. He died in 1931.

Doane Robinson

Brief History of South Dakota

Plenty of histories have been written since Doane Robinson’s Brief History of South Dakota was published in 1905, but that doesn’t mean you should discount his volume.”It’s still very much worth reading because so much of the history written in that period of time was fairly slanted when it came to the Native Americans and whites,” Roberts says.”But Robinson was more objective than most writing at the time.”

The history of a place grows with each passing day. By modern standards, the majority of our state’s history occurred after Robinson’s book appeared. But that may be the secret to its appeal. Robinson’s book focuses heavily on the region’s early history: Lewis and Clark’s expedition up the Missouri River, the rise of the fur trade, the gold boom in the Black Hills and the quest for statehood. Robinson also devoted full chapters to Sam Brown, who rode 150 miles on horseback through a blizzard to avert a battle with Indians, and the horrid winter of 1880-81.

Robinson was born in Sparta, Wisc., in 1856. He farmed in Minnesota, then moved to Watertown to practice law. He developed a strong interest in state history and became secretary of the state historical society. In addition to his Brief History, Robinson was a poet and also founded the Monthly South Dakotan, the first magazine to explore the history and culture of the state.

If Robinson’s literary legacy lies in his Brief History, his greatest overall contribution was growing the idea of Mount Rushmore. Inspired by Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture of Confederate soldiers at Stone Mountain, Georgia, Robinson originally envisioned figured carved into the Needles, but eventually settled on the heads of four famous leaders chiseled into the granite of Mount Rushmore.

After retiring as secretary of the state historical society, Robinson returned to farming near Pierre. He died in 1946 at age 90.

John Milton

South Dakota: A Bicentennial History

When New York publishing giant W.W. Norton embarked upon its States and the Nation Series commemorating the country’s bicentennial in 1976, editors asked John Milton to write South Dakota’s volume. Milton, an English professor at the University of South Dakota since 1963, was quickly gaining a national following for his short stories and fiction, and for establishing and editing South Dakota Review, the state’s literary journal and”a massive contribution,” Roberts says. Milton expressed reservations about writing a history of South Dakota, but colleagues”gave me a strong nudge when I was reluctant to take on this project,” he writes in the book’s preface. His 200-page volume became one of the state’s classic histories.”I know it was considered to be one of the best in that entire series,” Roberts says.”You don’t find him in it. It’s very factual, though he tends to stay away from the cultural issues that have divided us over the course of time.”

Milton’s background as a storyteller aided his treatment of South Dakota. His book is organized topically and reads like a novel. And his approach differed from other historians.”My concern is with the portrait, with the spirit of the place and of the people, who either visited it or settled down on it, making this particular place their home,” Milton wrote.

Herbert Krause

Wind Without Water, The Thresher and The Oxcart Trail

Herbert Krause penned just three novels during his 32-year career as a teacher and writer in residence at Augustana College, but Roberts includes all of them among his must reads for South Dakotans. Wind Without Water, The Thresher and The Oxcart Trail all describe the trials of farming the Plains 100 years ago.

“There’s no more realistic treatment of the way it was out here in the early 20th century,” Roberts says.”The frustrating part is that Krause just isn’t read today. Nobody reprints the trilogy. He became a more modern version of Hamlin Garland. No one has ever written farming like he did. People from this state are missing something if they don’t search him out.”

Krause was raised north of Fergus Falls, Minn. He developed a love of the written word at a young age, much to the chagrin of his blacksmith father. When young Krause begged for, and finally received, an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, his father told him,”Well, son, you’d have done better getting a pair of socks.”

Krause’s admiration for Ole Rolvaag led to his enrollment at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., although they never met because Professor Rolvaag died shortly after Krause arrived on campus. Krause longed to write of German homesteaders as Rolvaag had written about Norwegians. When Wind Without Rain appeared in 1939, critics immediately compared Krause to Rolvaag and eventually declared him to have surpassed his idol in Plains literature.

Newspapers in New York and Chicago heralded Wind Without Rain as national bestsellers. The book follows the Vildvogel family struggling to survive on the land of western Minnesota. The Thresher (1946) tells the story of Johnny Black, who hides personal pain behind his dominant steam-threshing rig in North and South Dakota. The Oxcart Trail (1954) is a love story rich with historical detail set along the trails that ran from northern Minnesota across the Dakotas to the Pacific Northwest in the 1850s and 1860s.

Krause was also a prolific poet and wrote articles about the customs of the Upper Midwest and ornithology. In 1970, he founded the Center for Western Studies. Krause died in 1976.

Mary Crow Dog

Lakota Woman

Roberts selected Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog because, he says,”It’s got some of the great lines I’ve ever seen in a book.” And you don’t have to read far into the book to find an example.”I am Mary Brave Bird,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter.”After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name ñ Ohitika Kin, Brave Woman, and fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy.

“I had my first baby during a firefight, with the bullets crashing through one wall and coming out through the other. When my newborn was only a day old and the marshals really opened up on us, I wrapped him up in a blanket and ran for it. We had to hit the dirt a couple of times, I shielding the baby with my body, praying, ëIt’s all right if I die, but please let him live.'”

“That’s one hell of an opening,” Roberts says.

Lakota Woman was published in 1991 and immediately became a national bestseller. It won the 1991 American Book Award and became a television movie produced by TNT and Jane Fonda in 1994.

The book chronicles Crow Dog’s life until 1977. She was born in 1953 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. At age 18, impressed by the teachings of medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, she joined the American Indian Movement. Her book is important because it provides a young Indian woman’s perspective on reservation plight, assimilation and racism in western South Dakota. But Crow Dog’s recollection of the Wounded Knee siege is a highlight.”There are no objective reports [of the Wounded Knee occupation],” Roberts says,”but her cry in the wilderness is very good.”

Crow Dog followed Lakota Woman was a sequel entitled Ohitika Woman in 1994. She died in 2013.

Sally Roesch Wagner

Daughters of Dakota

When Will Robinson served as state historian, he recognized that only half of South Dakota’s history was being told.”We have a shelf full of ponderous tomes, 32 inches in length with over 10,000 biographies of male South Dakotans,” Robinson lamented in the 1960s.”When it comes to the women who worked alongside the men and frequently made it possible for them to accomplish things which gave them a place in our history, little recognition has been given.”

But women’s history was being recorded thanks to Marie Drew, chair of the Pioneer Daughters Department of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. For 40 years she supervised the gathering of pioneer women’s stories in every state. South Dakota’s intimidating collection of 4,000 to 6,000 stories lay virtually untouched in the state archives until a spring day in 1987, when an archivist persuaded Sally Roesch Wagner to take a break from researching women’s suffrage to peruse the papers.

“My researcher’s eye knew that this was the find of a lifetime,” Wagner later wrote.”Represented was the scope and range of the lives of white women settlers when the land was taken for non-Indian settlement: white and black, rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, representing a spectrum of nationalities, ages, lifestyles and religions.”

Wagner strove to publish a book of stories in time for the South Dakota centenial in 1989. The first volume of Daughters of Dakota appeared that year and was followed by five more through 1994.

“In concentrating upon the women, you also concentrate upon the men, because they had to live this land together, even though it emphasizes the difficulties of women,” Roberts says.”The guys could get out. They’d go down to the river and cut wood, or plant corn and try to grow something. The women were stuck in whatever was the house, and it’s very legitimate to talk about the trials being quite different.”

Frederick Manfred

Lord Grizzly

The first time Frederick Manfred heard the legend of Hugh Glass, he knew he would someday write about it.”Hugh’s great wrestle with the grizzly, his desertion by friends, his fabulous crawl, his vengeful chase after the deserters, and its outcome ñ all these things seized hold of my imagination,” Manfred recalled.”I saw Hugh and his agony. I saw his matted grizzled beard, his flashing grieving eyes, his torn bleeding body, his godlike stubborn manner. I saw all this not with the eye of an historian but with the eye of a novelist.”

Glass was a real mountain man, recruited by fur trader William Ashley in 1822 to travel up the Missouri River to its source and collect furs. Glass’ near fatal encounter with a grizzly bear along the Grand River was real, and so was his 200 mile crawl across West River’s short grass prairie to Fort Kiowa. But Manfred’s Lord Grizzly, published in 1954, is a novel, not a historical account.

For nearly 10 years Manfred immersed himself in the story. His daughter Freya Manfred recalled how her father”researched the novel by crawling around on all fours with one leg bound in a makeshift splint, eating grubs and ants to see how they would have tasted to the book’s hero, old Hugh Glass.”

Manfred was a prolific writer, penning nearly two dozen books inside his tiny writing cabin at his home in Luverne, Minn. He taught briefly at the University of South Dakota and Augustana College and coined the term”Siouxland,” describing the region where South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa meet.

Lord Grizzly is part of Manfred’s Buckskin Tales series that explores life in the Upper Midwest through the 19th century. It is divided into three parts: the wrestle, the crawl and the showdown. They represent the three components of the Glass story that Manfred found to be the most consistent in various interpretations.

“This book reads extremely well today,” Roberts says.”It’s not at all dated. The adventure is incredible. The crawl is incredible. The entire story of revenge is incredible. He probably deserves more recognition for that than he’s ever gotten. He was very frustrated because he felt that he had done a lot of good work for literature of this region, and mostly people just sort of waved him away.”

O.W. Coursey

Pioneering in Dakota

O.W. Coursey may be the most prolific author that no one remembers. The title page of his short autobiography Pioneering in Dakota lists him as the author of”eight volumes of Biography, four of History, three on Biblical Characters, two of fiction, two on Literature, two of Short Stories, two of Winning Orations (Compiled), one on School Law and one on Ethics.”

Coursey, a writer, teacher and lecturer who operated the Educator Supply Company in Mitchell, chronicled the lives of many early South Dakotans, including Senator Alfred Kittredge and General William Henry Harrison Beadle, but it’s his unique first-hand account of homesteading in South Dakota that’s most worth reading, Roberts says.

“It’s not a comprehensive history. It’s a pioneering history, what it’s like to come to this country and settle,” Roberts says.”He wrote about the pioneer experience, including the first really comprehensive story about the Blizzard of 1888. On his total work, he should be remembered, and Pioneering in South Dakota is probably the best of his work.”

Pioneering in Dakota covers 14 years of Coursey’s life, beginning with his family’s train trip from Illinois to Huron in 1883. Along with his first-person account of the Blizzard of 1888, in which he was trapped in school, his chapters on filing and claiming a homestead, building a sod house, the coming of the railroad (and the fate of towns along the track) and his stories of surviving a tornado and a prairie wildfire provide a unique perspective of life in the late 19th century.

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

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Artist at Home

By Rick Hauffe

Terry Redlin, one of America’s great wildlife artists, died in Watertown on April 24 at the age of 78.

Editor’s Note: Terry Redlin, the Watertown artist famous for nostalgic landscapes and patriotic prairie scenes, died on April 24 at the age of 78. South Dakota Magazine published this profile of Redlin in the spring of 1994, shortly after he announced plans to locate the Redlin Art Center in his hometown. He considered the museum, which houses over 150 of Redlin’s original oil paintings, to be a”thank you” gift to the community that helped him become one of the country’s most treasured artists.

Terry Redlin, one of South Dakota’s best-known native sons and one of the nation’s most famous wildlife artists, fulfilled one lifelong dream last year by buying a home along Watertown’s Lake Kampeska. It is an alternate residence to his home along Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis-St. Paul, which gives both states bragging rights to a Redlin residency.

But Redlin’s second dream really has folks in Watertown buzzing, from local business development types to arts advocates. Redlin chose Watertown as the site to build the Redlin Art Center, a permanent home to display his original paintings.

Redlin is reticent about the Redlin Art Center. He’d prefer to announce his detailed plans later when he and local committee members of the Redlin Art Center Board are finished exploring ideas.

On reasons why he chose Watertown over locations closer to a bigger market in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Redlin is declarative. They go back to when his life focused on the hunting and fishing paradise of northeast South Dakota.

Redlin dreamed of becoming a forest ranger. Or anything else which would keep him where he could easily make time to hunt or fish. Aside from some undeveloped sketching abilities, Redlin had no ambition to become an artist.

“Back then, I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t care. As long as I had a little money for bait minnows and shells, everything was all right,” Redlin said.”I carved fishing plugs in the wintertime.”

The carefree course of Redlin’s life took an abrupt turn in his mid-teens when his motorcycle was struck by another vehicle. Redlin lost a leg in the accident. The man who hit him had no money or means to cover Redlin’s injury.

“If it hadn’t happened, I would have gone into the service. I had dreams to go away and be a forest ranger. It brought me to a reality that I had to sit down to make a living,” Redlin said. “My hobbies were to build models or draw, so I went with becoming an artist.”

Comforts of Home.

Florence Bruhn, Redlin’s high school art teacher, remembers those days. They weren’t easy. She helped him develop his sketching into a potential career option.

“Back then, Terry was so busy hunting and fishing he could hardly make time for school. But when he hurt his leg, he found another way to excel,” Bruhn, 83, said.”A lot of people think it’s a talent, but it’s not. It’s also a lot of work, and he put a lot of hard work into it.”

The state of South Dakota also came to Redlin’s rescue. It was a help Redlin never forgot.

The state provided a tuition grant to Redlin to help him rehabilitate from his injury. The grant put Redlin in the School of Associated Arts in St. Paul, where he further refined his skills to become a professional graphic artist.

It turned into an investment Redlin has sought to repay through his portrayal of South Dakota prairie landscapes in his paintings, and through his selection of Watertown as the site for his arts center.

Redlin chose his hometown of Watertown for his art center, a grand building near the junction of Highway 212 and Interstate 29. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

“The state gave me a grub stake. That’s the way I look at it,” Redlin said.”It was why, when we looked for a place to locate the arts center, we settled on South Dakota. I’m sure the grant was money which the state felt it’d be a million-to-one odds they’d ever see that investment come back. They were sending somebody to art school in Minnesota. What’s the chance they would ever come back?”

Redlin’s hero in art had been Norman Rockwell. He also wanted to become an illustrator. He landed his first job with Brown & Bigelow, where Rockwell and other famous illustrators were contributors. However, the demand for illustrators evaporated, and Redlin spent 25 years in commercial art in layout, graphic designing and illustrating.

It wasn’t work which landed him covers of Post magazine, like Rockwell’s most famous work, but it taught him about balance, light and other techniques.

It also bought time to research, photograph scenery and plan for going into business for himself as a wildlife artist. That research, and the thousands of photographs of scenery in South Dakota and Minnesota still show up today in his works.

“When I do field work, it’s with a camera,” Redlin said.”I did an awful lot of it back in the beginning. I took two years before I picked up a brush.”

Redlin’s first big break as an emerging artist came in 1977 when his painting, Winter Snows, made the cover of The Farmer magazine. In 1979, he made the jump into painting wildlife fulltime after demand for his works grew.

Redlin’s career awards are impressive. He won the highly competitive Minnesota Duck Stamp contest in 1981 and 1984. In 1982, he placed second in the federal duck stamp competition and won the Minnesota Trout Stamp contest. In 1983, he won the national Artist of the Year award for Ducks Unlimited, the highest honor for a wildlife artist.

The Redlin Art Center houses over 150 of Redlin’s original oil paintings. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

In 1991, U.S. Art Magazine took a national survey of galleries and found six of the year’s top 20 prints were Redlin’s. U.S. Art named Redlin”America’s Most Popular Artist” in 1993.

His paintings and prints gained fame quickly, because they represented more than another slough scene as a backdrop for a picture of ducks, geese or pheasants. Redlin occasionally puts humorous situations in his paintings. An oddity in several of his paintings is the Langenfeld Ice Cream sign, which recalls a Watertown company that has long since disappeared. He also slips in a grain elevator from the Watertown region and other local landmarks to give the paintings what he calls a”romantic realism.”

Dennis Tilly, who runs the framing and print section of the Knit Nook in Watertown, says that Redlin touch is what separates his works from others for his customers.

“It’s more than putting kids or wildlife in a painting. It’s everything. It’s the small touches in the scenery. The nostalgia and peacefulness and warmth make them so appealing,” Tilly said. ‘”When you put the kids and dogs into the beauty of the countryside, the lakes and rivers and streams, you get this come-on-home attitude. I think his works really project a good image of South Dakota and the Midwest in general.”

Tilly said more than half of the prints he sells in his shop on Kemp Avenue are of Redlin paintings.

That’s against some pretty tough competition, because Watertown claims as its own several other wildlife artists. Leading that list is John Wilson, who hit a home run in wildlife art several years ago by winning the federal duck stamp contest. Wilson has been a repeat winner of duck and pheasant stamp contests in South Dakota.

Other painters with Watertown ties who’ve done well in wildlife art are John Moisan, Bob Hinton, John Green and Larry Negaard.

“I think wildlife art is really big in Watertown because of all the artists who’ve come from here,” Tilly said.”Everyone in town has something in their homes.”

America.

That brings up another point.

Redlin and other wildlife artists have long been concerned that the wildlife art market has hit its saturation point. It’s a concern his teacher Florence Bruhn said she shared with Redlin several years ago.

“He was doing really well with all the ducks and pheasants and that kind of thing. But you can have so many ducks and pheasants on the walls and then you run out of room,” Bruhn said. “I told Terry you have to find something else.”

Once he firmly established his niche in the wildlife market, Redlin began in the mid-1980s to diversify beyond wildlife themes. The themes have changed, but his landscapes haven’t strayed too far from his boyhood haunts around Watertown.

One example is titled Amber Waves of Grain. It depicts a pioneer farmer teaching his wife how to use a one-bottom plow. The rolling prairie background was picked off a photograph Redlin took of landscape 4 miles east of Watertown along U.S. Highway 212.

Amber Waves of Grain is one-eighth of perhaps Redlin’s most ambitious accomplishment to date, the”America the Beautiful” series of eight paintings. The series is Redlin’s answer to his hero Norman Rockwell’s notable patriotic series of Post covers on the”Four Freedoms.” Each line in the first stanza of the song, “America the Beautiful,” is the title of one of the eight paintings.

The art center campus includes a gazebo, pond and walking paths. A summer concert is held on the green every year. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

“It was a patriotic thing,” Redlin said.”I’ve always wanted to do something like the ëFour Freedoms,’ and I thought of doing a series like this, but I shelved it because it was too big a project.”

Family members urged Redlin to produce the series, which he did over a span of several years.

“Six years ago, I got started and I got them done in between a lot of other projects,” Redlin said.”I had to wait until all eight were done before I could start releasing them, so now we’ve been releasing one every four months.”

The series is a hit in art galleries around the nation. Now Redlin’s next big project is the Redlin Art Center in Watertown.

Redlin enjoys the financial security of his success, but he has not been affected by fame. It’s fun to bump into his works unexpectedly.

The morning of our interview, a commercial during Good Morning America for a Wisconsin company flashed one of his works on the TV screen in his Lake Minnetonka home. The biggest surprise came during a recent episode of Matlock. Matlock, played by Andy Griffith, stood on one side of a fireplace, talking to a couple other characters while one of Redlin’s prints, Golden Retreat, hung center screen over the fireplace.

“I have no idea what the conversation was. I was too busy calling for Helene to come in here and look at that,” Redlin said.

Helene is Redlin’s wife. They met in school in Watertown. They have one son, Charles, who is Redlin’s assistant and constant companion in his work. The Redlins have two daughters, Kelly and Kim, and two grandchildren.

Beyond the arts center, Redlin says he hasn’t set any ambitious goals, other than to keep painting and developing new ideas. He said he can’t choose a particularly favorite painting from among his works.

“There are bits and pieces of every picture that I like. I can’t say there is an ultimate favorite. I guess my favorite painting is the one I haven’t painted yet,” Redlin said.”The most fun of it all is the anticipation, coming up with an idea and thinking out the layout ó making it all work together and balance. That’s what keeps it exciting.”

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From Guadalajara to Ciudad del Agua

By Michael Zimny

The Vega family includes (from left) Carlos Jr., Carlos, Pepe and Donny.

Carlos Vega named the three restaurants he owns in eastern South Dakota after the city of his birth — Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. But the feeling you get when you walk into a Guadalajara on a blustery spring day in South Dakota — of having stumbled into a tropical, sunshiny alternate world — is all Tonal·.

The Guadalajaran suburb of Tonal· (pop. 374,000) is a mecca for artists and artisans. Home to the Museo Nacional de la Cer·mica, the city is renowned for its pottery, and has been a center of ceramic arts since pre-Hispanic times. At Thursday and Sunday art markets, visitors can shop for traditional bruÒido, bandera, petatillo and canelo style pottery and other handicrafts.

Over the years, Carlos’ wife Esther has made innumerable trips to Tonal· to curate the unmistakable ambience of a South Dakota Guadalajara — shipping back ornately carved tables, benches and chairs, metal sculpture, pottery and decorative art by the truckload. Almost every object has the cheery gleam of a burnished (bruÒido) urn. To open the door to a Guadalajara is to unleash a Nahuatl sunbeam, which can be a welcome respite from the beige of a long winter. The place hums with an ebullient energy. Even in summer, when the Glacial Lakes glisten and the prairie is a verdant green, Guadalajara just might be the wellspring of color where the cormorants score the emerald in their eyes.

So how does a working class guy from Guadalajara end up a restaurateur in eastern South Dakota? Carlos migrated to Seattle in the late 1980s to work with his brother Pepe at a restaurant owned by Pepe’s father-in-law.

“He started from the bottom,” Pepe (who recently moved from Seattle to manage the Brookings restaurant) says of Carlos, a man of few words. “He worked as a dishwasher…”

Carlos:”Dishwasher, cook, busboy, waiter, manager…”

Pepe:”He went up and up every position. He worked really hard to get to where he is right now.”

Mexican art is everywhere inside the Brookings Guadalajara’s, from the walls to the chairs.

In the early 1990s, Carlos became intrigued by talk of a land of lakes to the east.”Some customers of Pepe’s had moved to Watertown and they said that it was a nice town for business,” he says.

“They told me, ‘Come to Watertown, they don’t have any Mexican businesses there,'” Pepe adds.

In 1995, Carlos left Seattle to address that situation. The brothers’ hunch about Watertown turned out to be right, at first. The opening year was good. But the winter of 1996 put a deep freeze on many business aspirations throughout the Dakotas and Minnesota, and almost ended Guadalajara.

“Those were really hard years with the snow,” Carlos says.

“The winter was really hard, when you hardly have enough to pay your employees,” Pepe says.”It was very difficult.”

Then the return of American pelicans to Watertown from their wintering grounds — perhaps on the Lago de Chapala — heralded spring. Carlos figured growth could be the antidote to snow. Guadalajara expanded to Madison, where it failed, but then found a footing in Brookings, where a couple of generations of college students have studied the extensive menu. He opened a store, El Tapatio, specializing in Mexican groceries next to the Brookings restaurant. Four years ago, the burgeoning Guadalajara mini-chain expanded to Sioux Falls.

With each new restaurant, Esther’s holistic, straight-from-Tonal· approach to the Guadalajara experience endears a new corps of loyal customers.

So, how’s the food? Your correspondent is not a food critic with the expertise to dive into culinary minutiae, so suffice it to say it’s plentiful and delicious. My finicky 8-month old daughter loved the lengua (so did I), which is all the endorsement I need.

Carlos’ sons, Carlos Jr., and Donny, are both involved in the business now, and the restaurants are established enough to allow Carlos Sr., and Esther to visit Guadalajara three or four times a year, giving Esther plenty of opportunities to scour the art markets. Carlos Jr., says he can see Guadalajara making further inroads into South Dakota in the future. Where? That’s a family secret for now.”Somewhere close to home,” he says.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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My Other Pickup’s A Bike

By Lee Schoenbeck

Banana seats, motorcycle handlebars and losing the training wheels are rites of passage in South Dakota. In a land where our children roam free about our communities, the bike is the ticket to independence. It was that great invention that gave you speed and distance for the first time in your life. Cruising across town to visit a buddy, get to the pool, or drive by the cute girl’s house were now all within the realm of possibility. But somewhere around sweet 16 and the longed for driver’s license, the Schwinn Flyer was relegated to that back part of the garage that new found maturity had passed by. Or so I thought.

My Next Bike

I don’t know when the last bike was a part of my life, but I know how the current one came to be. We married in 1987 and that next spring, for my 30th birthday, my wife thought I needed a bike so we could go riding together. My Schwinn World Sport was state of the art and ready to rock. It came with those cool curved handlebars, two sets of brakes and 10 speeds. Life on two wheels couldn’t get any better. I think the Europeans were the inspiration for the touring bikes of that time period, which brings up one strange item. Those bikes had seats so hard that to find them comfortable only made sense if you compared them to life with two World Wars in your backyard. But Americans weren’t about to be accused of being soft in the rear, and so for a few decades that stuck too.

That bike is still my only bike, but it isn’t the oldest bike at our home. My wife got a Schwinn Traveler from her parents for her 16th birthday, and it’s still the bike she uses. I don’t know much about the economics of the bike business, but two bikes that are going strong after a combined 63 years sounds like a tough business to be in. I have heard rumors that the product has been improved through the years, but you can’t believe everything you hear.

Tour Dakota

A few years back, the Tour Dakota was doing a leg from De Smet to Watertown and a buddy asked me to join him. I dusted off the old steel Schwinn and was ready to tour. That was the beginning of the lesson.

He gave me a water bottle, which I couldn’t quite understand since we were only riding about 65 miles. You can do that in the pickup in an hour, without a water bottle. About half way through the tour I commented on not having opened the water bottle yet. My friend’s response? “This isn’t going to be good.” With about 15 miles to go, I experienced cramps that must be something like labor pains without the good ending. That day I learned a new respect for those people in the funny spandex pants. I also found out they are athletes, even if they look kind of odd in their funny gear, some of which I promptly went out and bought.

Equipment: It’s Function, Not Fashion

If you’re going to ride for more than a little bit, here are a few tips. Bike shorts are a must. I realize they look goofy, and at first they feel worse. It will be your first opportunity to get a feel for adult Depends. But if you are traveling any distance, you will soon sing the praises of the person that designed the well-placed padding. The next key item is the bike seat. Forget the Europeans, these babies now come with padding and well placed indentations. Bike gloves look like they were stolen from a homeless person, but again make the trip more comfortable. A good grip is a good thing. A water bottle that you can open with your teeth is another critical component.

There are these cool devices you can add to your handlebars that allow you to rest your arms and weight on them while cruising. For speed, you need to look at your feet and you have choices. Wear tennis shoes with no special bike gear and bring up the rear of the peloton forever or put on special shoes that clip you in like it’s the electric chair and hope you and your bike stay one with gravity. My preference — and this is old school — is option three: the toe basket things you can put your foot in and get out of just as easily if you and the rules of gravity have a conflict. The reason for all this foot attention is that being strapped into the pedal allows you to take advantage of the power of the pull on the upstroke.

Finally, but most importantly, is the helmet. Riding bike without a helmet is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute — great thrill, but eventually, splat.

Cycling aficionados surely have more and better explanations for the gear. I’m just saying there’s more to biking than a pretty paint job and tires filled with air.

Apparently somewhere between 1987 and the present, they came up with various featherweight materials from which to build bikes. You won’t see many of those good steel bikes around anymore. The serious bikers spend thousands on carbon or titanium bikes. Their bikes come with computers, speedometers and rear-view mirrors.

RASDAK

This spring Rep. Fred Deutsch asked me to join him on the Webster to Milbank leg of the Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), and this time I was ready for the 65 mile jaunt. The first thing was to carbo load. I don’t know if it matters, but my mind and body think it does. Also, drink lots of water, and hydrate through the whole trip (I’m not stupid. One trip through bike labor pains was enough for me).

The tour came off the Coteau at Whipple’s Hill, which is the Wilmot rest stop on I-29. Peddling up the final incline before going over the top is like reaching Heaven. I’m not sure of a view or a cycling experience than can match cresting the last hill and seeing three states stretched out in front of you as you start a 900-foot descent.

Now about that descent. Cycling gear isn’t exactly biker leathers. I’m now holding on for my life wondering what parts of me they’ll find if my tire blows. My eyes are glued to the road right in front of my tire, until I briefly look up to see Fred, pedaling his butt off trying to find the top end speed for his bike. At this point I’m thinking I need new friends. We survived the descent, and I learned that we hit 42 miles an hour, which means the ink spot would have been about a foot square if the tire blew. Some of these bikers clearly have a different mindset, or lack thereof.

New Law

RASDAK gave Fred and I an opportunity to see the new bike passing law in action. Because I volunteered to solve an impasse in a legislative committee, where Fred and I serve, I ended up drafting the new law that went into effect July 1. Fred and the cycling community shepherded it through the legislature, and apparently cyclists in the 5-7 zip code have the safest highway passing law on the books. Vehicles need to allow 3 feet when passing a cyclist in areas of 35 mph speed limits or less, and 6 feet if the speed limit is greater than 35 mph.

Potential For South Dakota

Cycling appears to have a good future in South Dakota. Our state manages 337 miles of trails, of which the Mickelson Trail in the Black Hills is the most famous (and a great ride). Many communities have constructed their own trails. Here in Watertown, the city has built over 20 miles of bike trails that follow the Big Sioux River in town, and loop around Lake Kampeska for a great work out.

RASDAK is annual event that treks across South Dakota from west to east, and is worth a week of your life next summer.

GET A BIKE And GRAB SOME FUN EXERCISE

Biking isn’t just for kids anymore. It’s an adult activity, without the hangover. Look for a friend or a trail near you and give it a go. You might get addicted and start buying all that fancy stuff to go with your inevitable biker shorts. I’m thinking about one of those cool rearview mirrors ….

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Blessed Are The Butterfly Makers

By Lee Schoenbeck

It may be a slight paraphrase from the Sermon on the Mount, but who can argue with the idea that making butterflies is passing on a little more peace and beauty in the world. If you have a garden in South Dakota, you can make butterflies — seriously. We’re not talking little grey, not-so-special things. We’re talking the granddaddy — the monarch.

It’s springtime and planting butterfly plants, a form of milkweed, will provide hours of enjoyment with your new neighbors, the monarchs.

MONARCHS

These big beautiful flying insects used to have a lot of family and friends in America. Numbers were once estimated as high a billion. Today they have dwindled to about 90 percent less than their 20-year average, or about 35 million. But in our front yard, the monarch numbers are up — in the dozens.

MILKWEEDS

Monarchs need milkweed to survive. Female monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed plants. There are many varieties of milkweed, and America is actually divided into mostly four milkweed regions. As luck would have it, the east half of the 57- zip code and the west half don’t share the same zone. Being a child of the Coteau Des Prairie, this article focuses on the east half, which is in the Northeast Region.

The butterfly weed, asclepias tuberosa, is a milkweed plant for your flower garden that monarchs love. The plant has clusters of small flowers, and I don’t know anything about them. My wife is the master gardener who finds and plants things like this. I just like what the butterflies do on it.

You can find monarchs on the milkweed in your ditch too, but it’s more fun to have them right outside your door in the garden where you can spy on them.

WATCHING YOUR GARDEN GROW

The female monarch will lay her pinhead-sized eggs on the underside of your milkweed plant leaves. Four days later the caterpillar will hatch from the egg, and those are hungry dudes. The yellow and black striped caterpillars will eat the eggshell, the leaf on which they were born, and a fair number of the leaves on the plant. They can eat a leaf in an hour.

Eventually the caterpillar will attach to a leaf, form a J and, while hanging upside down, spin a silk pocket. As the caterpillar molts the last time it becomes a chrysalis, a pretty green thimble looking cocoon that hangs down from the butterfly plant leaf as a monarch butterfly grows inside.

Eventually the butterfly emerges and sits on the butterfly plant letting its wings dry before flying away. This whole process happens over a few days, and the plants attract many caterpillars. Consequently, you have many chrysalises growing at the same time and you — and your children, if you share — can watch the process unfold in near real time.

DUCK DYNASTY MEETS THE MONARCH

Now my wife is a dedicated and refined master gardener who has never watched Duck Dynasty, but she does make life entertaining around the home place. This past year she saw firsthand the challenges the monarchs face, when on occasion the chrysalis would disconnect from the plant and fall to the ground. Apparently, like a small bird falling from the nest, it’s a challenge for the butterfly to grow and emerge in that setting. Not to be deterred, my resourceful wife found those black paperclips that can hold about 20 pages together and went to work. She would paperclip the chrysalis back to the plant! Personally I would have favored duct tape, but I’m no certified master gardener. Besides, who am I to argue with success? All of the paper-clipped monarchs grew and emerged to be butterflies. Who knew that I married the Mother Teresa of monarchs!

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Welcome, Mr. President

By Bernie Hunhoff

Mr. President, welcome to South Dakota. You’ll be landing Air Force One on Friday in the center of our great USA. The official geographic center is near Belle Fourche, a six-hour car drive straight west of where you’ll speak in Watertown.
In between are farms and ranches, towns and small cities — all populated by mostly hard-working and decent people who don’t expect much of the Washington whence you come.
Oh, we’ll take what we can get when offered. We’ve seen enough hard times — droughts, floods, hail storms and tornadoes — to know that you don’t bite anybody’s hand. But we don’t expect much. Most of us were raised with the belief that the next government check — like the next rain — might be the last for awhile, and we’re ok with that.
We figure we’d have the same number of farmers and ranchers if Washington had never sent a nickel through an ag program. We farm because we farm. For the sake of pure patriotism, we’d host Ellsworth Air Force Base for the nation even if it didn’t add a dime to the economy. Our Native American citizens would still call places like Pine Ridge and Standing Rock their home even if you tore up the treaties and never spent another dollar on the rez. And we would have probably allowed you (I say”you” because as president, you represent the government to us) to flood our middle section of the state by the four Missouri River dams even if we didn’t get some fine walleye fishing in exchange.
As a state senator, I can promise you that we’d find a way to balance our state budget if we lost the 40% that comes from Washington. It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d survive the same way we dig out of blizzards. One shovel after another. Our senior citizens appreciate Medicare and Social Security, but the cost of living is lower here so we’d probably even get by without those wonderful perks.
Washington is a million miles away from our daily lives.
I wish you had a a day or two to spend in South Dakota. You could take federal Highway 212 from Watertown and drive to Belle Fourche, past the most cussedly independent folks on our planet. Most of them don’t belong to your political party, but you could stop in any small town or pull into any farm driveway and you’d be met with the biggest smiles you’ve ever enjoyed. As a Democrat, you’d love the giant concrete donkey at Tinkertown, just west of Watertown, and the immense fiberglass pheasant at Redfield.
As you cross the great Missouri, America’s grandest river, you’ll enter the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, one of the places where our government sent the Lakota. It hasn’t worked well from most viewpoints. Capitalism hasn’t taken root. Health care is a disaster. Alcoholism is a problem. But it is Home to the Lakota, with a capital H. The reservation people face many challenges, but it wouldn’t take you long to find very spiritual and determined people who are working to make things better for the next generation.
The Cheyenne also marks the gateway to true cowboy country. On down Highway 212, you’ll want to stop for a hot beef sandwich and some conversation at the Faith Livestock Auction Barn. The salty ranchers of West River are everything Ronald Reagan dreamed of being.
South Dakotans neither love or hate the government you run. Likewise, most neither love or hate you. Oh, we have a few political nut cakes. But fewer than most places. Most South Dakotans are too busy with daily life to think a lot about Washington and all your problems.
But don’t get me wrong. I welcome you to South Dakota. We all welcome you. We’re always happy when folks come here and spend some money, just as we like a good rain.

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Dreaming in South Dakota

By Katie Hunhoff

Have you ever gone on vacation and thought, “It would be fun to buy a cabin here?” Or maybe it was a houseboat or villa. Closer to home, have you thought about owning a Victorian mansion, a cafe in a Black Hills mountain town or renovating a 1930s apartment building?

One of our magazine’s popular new departments is built around such dreams. So we named it “South Dakota Dreaming,” and in each issue we write about a place for sale that make us imagine, “what if?”

Our first dream-worthy property was Olive Place, an 1887 Queen Anne Victorian mansion just north of Watertown. It has three fireplaces, 14 stained glass windows and three chandeliers. The house was built for local banker Homer D. Walrath and his wife Emma. Constructed for $15,000, it was once called the finest house in South Dakota. In 1966 the house was moved from its historic location to an intersection just outside town. The property is edged with pines and lilacs and current owners, Mike and Darlene Gudmunson, planted lindens, maples, birch, ash, elm and locust. A four-stall heated garage sits behind the house.

While touring the home, we saw ornate woodwork, including hardwood floors with parquet borders, three granite fireplaces and a curved cherry wood stairway. The house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms. There are even maid’s quarters, which were built for the Walraths’ faithful employee, Tina Olson.

Three hundred miles or more west of Watertown, we found a little Black Hills cafe called the Wrangler that inspired our next “dreaming” story. It sits on Mount Rushmore Road in the little city of Custer. We envisioned rising early each crisp mountain morning to start coffee. We’d fry some eggs and chat with regulars for a few hours. Walk to the bank with a deposit during the lull after breakfast, and return to help staff with the noon rush. Then spend the afternoon hiking or trout fishing in a clear mountain stream.

A visit to the cafe revealed our dream wasn’t too far off the mark. The Wrangler does a bustling business, full of regulars and tourists. It is one of Custer’s oldest eateries, dating back to the 1950s. Owners Steve and Amanda Blume serve over 100,000 meals a year at the cafe — leaving little time for trout fishing. He and Amanda’s two children are regulars at the cafe. Their son Connor, 7, draws pictures and sells them to customers for a quarter (the cost of a gumball from the machine).

Steve says that after 24 years at the Wrangler, and with two small children to raise, it’s time for a change. So they listed the Wrangler for sale with a local realtor. But Steve is attached to the place and says he may even work for the new owners. “It’s rewarding to serve good food and to know that people enjoy it,” he says.

Our current “dreaming” features a 1930s luxury apartment house in Yankton that has fallen on hard times. The Hudson has seen better days — and hopefully there are better years ahead — but through its ups and downs the big brick structure in Yankton’s historic residential district has always had benefactors who’ve kept the roof from leaking.

Our new feature might sound like we’re in the real estate business but nothing could be further from the truth. We are doing it purely for entertainment value, and we would never accept any monetary benefits from sales of properties we feature.

If you find yourself dreaming about a South Dakota property as you’re traveling our state, give us a call. All we’re looking for is something with a price tag and an interesting story.

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A Scoundrel and a Saint

By Katie Hunhoff

The homes of two territorial governors still stand in South Dakota, the Mellette house in Watertown and the Pennington house in Yankton, now home to South Dakota Magazine. Both are stately, attractive Italianate brick houses but they housed very different men with different ideas on how the territory should be governed.

The Pennington house was built in 1875 by John L. Pennington, a carpetbagger appointed by President Grant. Pennington’s predecessor John Burbank spent more of his term in Washington than he did in Dakota Territory. Yankton was mostly a clapboard town. Pennington’s two-story building, made from locally manufactured soft brick, is a humble abode compared to the Victorian mansions built just a few years later in Yankton but it has stood the test of time.

Pennington’s character was tested when the territorial legislature established Custer, Lawrence and Pennington counties in the Black Hills. Pennington had authorization to appoint officials for the new counties, and he promptly gave jobs to his Yankton cronies rather than West River locals. As expected, there was an uproar, especially when the new appointees stayed in Yankton rather than relocating west.

To make matters worse, he then chose Sheridan over Rapid City as the capital of his namesake county. Rumors abounded that he had a stake in the Sheridan town site, which fueled even more resentment.

Locally elected officials soon replaced Pennington’s friends, but the governor’s reputation was tarnished. William A. Howard succeeded him in 1878. Five years later, Yankton lost the territorial capital to Bismarck in large part because of the cronyism practiced in the river city.

Nine years later, Arthur C. Mellette became the last territorial governor. His integrity was beyond reproach. In fact, Mellette actively campaigned for statehood for Dakota Territory and spent $16,000 of his own money traveling to Washington to lobby the cause.

Mellette was successful and became our first governor. He faced hard times immediately as the state was crippled by a drought that hung on for years. He traveled east again, at his own expense, to raise money from charities. One trip raised almost $40,000 and all donations went directly to needy families. He spent $3,600 of his own money to manage the funds.

After serving two terms, Mellette decided not to seek re-election in 1893. His health was failing and he was devastated after his eldest son, Wylie, committed suicide during a fit of delirium from typhoid fever.

The last tragedy came in 1895 when Mellette’s good friend, State Treasurer William Walter Taylor, stole $300,000 from public funds and fled to South America. Because Mellette served as bondsman for Taylor, he was legally required to pay for the thievery. Worse, Mellette felt betrayed and personally responsible. He handed over all his money and property, including his fine new home in Watertown. Taylor was eventually caught, but Mellette was never repaid.

Broke, homeless and betrayed, the Mellettes moved to Kansas. Mellette died on May 25, 1896. His wife, Maggie, fulfilled her husband’s wish by returning him to South Dakota for burial. Thousands paid respects as he lay in state at Watertown’s Arcade Hotel and for his burial at Mount Hope Cemetery. At the funeral, Mellette’s last statement as governor was recalled: “May God bless the people of South Dakota and their children forever and make them all worthy representatives of a great and grand state.”

After Pennington’s term as territorial governor he stayed in Yankton and started the Weekly Telegram. He opposed dividing Dakota Territory into two states and in 1891 returned to the South. He died in Anniston, Alabama and is buried nearby in the Oxford Cemetery.

Pennington met many historic figures at the foot of his black walnut stairway in his house; riverboat captains, military officers and Indian chiefs. If you’re interested in visiting a piece of territorial history, we’d be happy to give you a tour of our magazine publishing office.

You may also tour the Mellette House, which is preserved by local historians in Watertown and open to the public. The house features a beautiful circular wood stairway that was built in Minnesota and brought by train.

Our territorial governors lived far from perfect lives but they built a foundation for our state that still serves us today.