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George Kingsbury: Eyewitness to History

By Roger Holtzmann

George Kingsbury is considered the Father of Journalism in South Dakota. He published the Yankton Press and Dakotan for 40 years and authored the impressive History of Dakota Territory.

George Washington Kingsbury stepped off the Marsh & Rustin stagecoach at Yankton, Dakota Territory, on March 17, 1862. The muddy little river town was then only three years old. Kingsbury, a journeyman printer, planned to work there for a few months, then return home to Kansas and get on with his life.

Things didn’t work out quite that way.

Kingsbury arrived at a historic moment. Gov. William Jayne had that very day convened Dakota’s first legislature in the rude settlement’s log-walled Episcopal church; its members were charged to lay the foundation of,”a government that would endure for all time,” Kingsbury wrote in his History of Dakota Territory.”[Their] duty was a sacred one.”

Which the delegates put off until they’d done a lot of logrolling and selected a permanent capital city. Vermillion and Yankton were the main contenders, but the latter’s supporters thought they had things buttoned up thanks to a back-channel bargain. They supported John Shober and George Pinney for council president and Speaker of the House; in return, the pair from Bon Homme was supposed to back Yankton’s bid.

Pinney was a man of no small ability,”the peer of any other member,” wrote Kingsbury, but he was also an inveterate schemer and”inclined to be erratic.” His fellow legislators watched him,”with constant apprehension of mischief … a harmless motion to adjourn from him would be accepted by half the members as portending a plot.” Pinney was elected Speaker, then promptly reneged on his deal with the Yankton delegation; he didn’t stay bought, as historian Doane Robinson put it, which set off days of parliamentary wrangling.

Excitement was”at a fever-heat” and spectators thronged the lobby when the capital bill came up for consideration, wrote Kingsbury. Suddenly, troops of the Dakota Cavalry, with bayonets fixed, marched into the legislative chamber and surrounded the Speaker’s podium. Pinney had secretly asked Gov. Jayne to dispatch the soldiers, either to quash a rumored conspiracy to have him replaced as Speaker or as part of a convoluted intrigue to embarrass the governor, but all the maneuver did was”arouse great indignation” among the membership. They demanded an explanation and Pinney’s scheme”went to pieces in an hour.”

Pinney was forced to resign and Yankton won the prize, but settling the matter didn’t calm the waters. John Boyle of Vermillion and Enos Stutsman of Yankton”had some hot words” over dinner at the Ash Hotel, wrote Kingsbury, and matters soon escalated.”Boyle seized the ketchup bottle and flung it at Stutsman’s head, narrowly missing him. ‘Stuts’ retaliated with a fusillade of tumblers, cups and the skeleton of a fowl that had contributed to the feast. The combatants then flung themselves … across the table for a finish fight,” that might have resulted in serious injuries had not friends of the two men intervened.

Lawmaking on the frontier was proving to be a less than genteel affair, which did not come as a surprise to the delegates. Jim Somers, the House of Representatives’ Sergeant-at-Arms, was a burly ex-lumberjack with a violent streak; he later shot a sheriff and was himself killed in a shootout near Chamberlain. This preference for solving problems with his fists or worse was common knowledge before he was appointed; the legislators apparently considered this a recommendation for the job of keeping order in the House.

Somers and a group of lawmakers were drinking one evening in Antoine Robeare’s saloon, the legislature’s second home, when Pinney came in the front door.”Suddenly the window … flew up and Speaker Pinney popped out,” wrote Kingsbury. Somers appeared at the window, grinning, as another legislator and Robeare took after the fleeing Pinney — a chase that ended when the ex-speaker drew a pistol and his pursuers'”belligerent ardor moderated.”

By the time the legislative session ended in May the members had managed to discharge their sacred duty despite all the side shows. Kingsbury, meanwhile, reconsidered his plans. Like many a young man in those years, he had headed west in search of adventure and opportunity. He found both in Yankton. There was no need to look any farther.

*****

George W. Kingsbury was born in 1837, on a farm in upstate New York. He learned the printing trade as an apprentice at the Utica Daily Evening Telegraph, but at age 18,”[he] removed to Wisconsin to work with civil engineers on the Watertown & Madison Railroad,” wrote Kingsbury in an autobiographical sketch he penned for History of Dakota Territory. When the Panic of 1857 brought construction on that line to a halt he drifted west, from newspaper to newspaper, eventually reaching Leavenworth, Kansas Territory.

The Territorial Capitol at Yankton, photographed in the early 1860s.

Fort Leavenworth was a staging point for army supply trains on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1850s. Kingsbury decided this made for an opportunity,”to see the western country at government expense by signing on as a driver,” a plan he soon laid aside after he saw how much grueling work it took to yoke a dozen oxen to each wagon, never mind manhandle it across the prairie. He returned to town and found a position with the Leavenworth Daily Ledger.

Kansas entered the Union in 1861, and opportunity drew Kingsbury to Topeka, the new state’s capital. There he met Josiah Trask, who had parlayed his political connections into a contract as the official public printer for both Kansas and Dakota Territory, which came into being in March of that year. Trask hired Kingsbury to do the actual printing work in Dakota while he stayed in Kansas, a decision that had tragic consequences for him. Trask, a man of strong abolitionist beliefs, was among those killed when the infamous Confederate raider William Quantrill attacked Lawrence, Kansas, a hotbed of the anti-slavery cause.

Kingsbury had been in Dakota barely two months before he went from itinerant printer to publisher and co-owner of the Weekly Dakotian. Frank Ziebach and William Freney had started the paper in 1861 to help a third partner, Capt. John Todd, become the first territorial delegate; once Todd was elected, the Dakotian faded away. By the time Ziebach and Kingsbury revived what had been a Democratic paper the territory’s political winds had shifted, wrote Kingsbury,”and prudence suggested the formation of the partnership [in the name of Kingsbury], a Republican.”

Thus began what historian Bob Karolevitz called”a game of journalistic musical chairs” that went on for years. Newspapers in Yankton combined and split, opened and folded and opened again with different owners; opponents in one election cycle might be partners in the next. Kingsbury’s tenure at the Weekly Dakotian lasted until he fell out with Dr. Walter Burleigh, who had purchased a piece of the paper to promote his campaign for territorial delegate. Kingsbury and Moses K. Armstrong then started a new publication, the Dakota Union, and”fought a glorious fight” against the good doctor, as an admirer put it. Burleigh, the resident Indian agent who set a standard for corruption that was never bettered in Dakota, triumphed despite their opposition, and in the election’s wake the two warring newspapers merged to form the Union and Dakotaian.

Toward the end of his first decade in Dakota, Kingsbury purchased a state-of-the-art steam-powered press, the first in Dakota Territory, and used it to churn out the news under various banners. In 1875 he founded the Black Hiller, aimed at the gold seekers flooding into town. It proved so financially successful that it enabled Kingsbury and Wheeler Bowen to begin publishing the Press & Dakotaian, a daily newspaper that first appeared on April 26 of that year and is still publishing five editions a week in an era when many small daily papers have turned off their presses and closed their doors.

*****

George Kingsbury wrote hundreds of thousands of words in his career, but next to nothing about his personal life. His autobiographical sketch in History of Dakota Territory is sparse and devoid of any sense of the man.”On the 20th of September, 1864,” he wrote,”George W. Kingsbury, of Yankton, and Lydia Maria Stone, daughter of Nathan and Laura Stone, of Lawrence, Kansas, were married at the home of the bride’s mother.”

Lydia and George returned to Yankton and settled down to raise three sons, George, Theodore and Charles. Lydia’s passing evoked the only morsel of emotion in the essay, and that sounded oddly stilted:”Lydia, the wife and mother, died February 1, 1898, and after a few years the little family was broken up, the home practically abandoned.”

George Kingsbury (back row, left) was honored as a pioneer of Dakota Territory during its 50th anniversary in 1911. Other honorees included C.J. Holman (back right) and (front row, from left) Horace Bailey, John Shober, William Jayne and Joseph Hanson.

Kingsbury spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Yankton, which afforded him a front row seat as the territory’s history unfolded, but he was more than an observer. When the territorial legislature convened for its second session in 1863 Kingsbury took a seat in the upper house as a delegate from Yankton, one of many public and private offices he held through the years. He sat on Yankton’s first city commission, was secretary of the corporation that launched the Dakota Southern Railroad and served as the territory’s assessor of internal revenue; he also captained one of Yankton’s two polo teams and produced a traveling play,”The Chaperones.”

When statehood arrived in 1889 Kingsbury served a term in the new legislature and was later appointed to the State Board of Charities and Corrections by Gov. Andrew Lee. On the journalism front, he found himself covering a familiar story. South Dakota’s voters were to select a new capital in the first statewide election of 1890, and the contending cities’ tactics often landed”within the boundaries of criminality,” the old-timer wrote.”[Their] unbecoming and disgraceful conduct cast a shadow upon the fair name and fame of the young state.”

Kingsbury sold his publishing interests in 1902 and began work on History of Dakota Territory, a project he was uniquely qualified to undertake. Modern readers may find fault with some of Kingsbury’s attitudes, his absolute belief in the superiority of white culture over that of the indigenous”savages” among them, but none can say he didn’t do a thorough job. History’s five ponderous volumes, bursting with original documents and encyclopedic detail, dealing with every major and many minor matters of the era, constitute an invaluable resource. Scholars and students of history alike are in his debt.

*****

Yankton’s business community had dreamed of a bridge across the Missouri River since the settlement’s earliest days, the better to draw trade from Nebraska. Financial and technical problems sidelined various schemes through the years; in the meantime, a ferry launched in 1870, and a pontoon bridge followed 20 years after that. This had to be dismantled and reassembled twice a year, however, so it was clearly only a stopgap measure.

Kingsbury had seen a number of bridge schemes up close over the years, and he was on hand when one finally succeeded in spanning the Missouri. E.J. Dowling and an informal group of Yankton’s leading citizens known as the Monday Evening Club resolved that the only way to ensure a bridge was built was to build it themselves.”Their spirit served as midwife to the project,” wrote Kingsbury in a special edition of his newspaper published when steel reached Nebraska.

When the Meridian Highway Bridge formally opened on October 11, 1924, the 87-year-old George Kingsbury rode across as an honored pioneer. It was one of his last public appearances. He grew more and more feeble and slipped away on January 28, 1925, leaving a legacy in South Dakota history and journalism that few scribes will ever match.

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

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Forever Close to Home

By John Andrews

You could always hear his voice above the crowd.

Every Fourth of July, hundreds of people come to Memorial Park in Lake Norden to cap off the city’s Independence Day celebration with an amateur baseball game and fireworks. It’s a popular time for school and family reunions, so people who grew up in Lake Norden often find their way back. The ball game is a good time to catch up if you missed the pork barbecue the night before, so there’s a constant buzz of conversation humming throughout the park as the game is played.

Mel Antonen

Mel Antonen’s voice always stood out. He’d grown up in a house right across the street from the ballpark and did every job imaginable as his father, Ray, managed the Lake Norden Lakers: groundskeeping, announcing, scorekeeping and, eventually, playing. It was small town baseball that launched him on his career as a journalist covering Major League Baseball for USA Today, Sports Illustrated and, most recently, Sirius Radio and Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in Washington, D.C. But no matter what major league city he found himself in, or what superstar he was interviewing, his thoughts were never far from Lake Norden. He came back on the Fourth of July as often as he could; it pained him to miss even a single year. He sometimes regaled friends with stories from his reporting, but more often than not they relived their own days on the diamond or reminisced about the colorful characters they all remembered. He stayed connected to Lake Norden, and in doing so became a mentor to many of us who grew up there.

Antonen died on January 30 at age 64. For 383 days, he battled a rare autoimmune disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) that became compounded by COVID-19 and lymphoma, a combination so unlikely that doctors told him he was probably the only person in world battling all three at once.

Antonen on the mound in Lake Norden.

As a kid growing up in Lake Norden, I loved it when Mel came home because I felt like it gave me an inside connection to the world of professional baseball. I’d ask about my perennially hapless Chicago Cubs, and he’d share some nugget he’d gotten at the winter meetings or through interviews. We’d talk about new ideas for exhibits inside the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame, which Ray was instrumental in bringing to Lake Norden and which remained a passion project for Mel.

Our relationship changed in the summer of 2007. I had finished school and was trying to figure out if more education was in my future or if I needed to find a job. With a wife and two kids, my sensibilities pulled me toward employment, so I brought my resume and a few writing samples to the South Dakota Magazine office.

Bernie Hunhoff told me they didn’t have a need for a writer, but there was a marketing position open and that he’d review my materials and get back to me. About a week later he called and offered me the job.

I knew that I probably wasn’t cut out for marketing, but this was South Dakota Magazine. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I needed advice. So I called Mel, who told me as politely as he possibly could that I would be an idiot if I didn’t take it. The marketing thing fizzled out, as I had suspected, but nearly 14 years later I’m still here, and I have Mel to thank, at least in part. I know he was there for others, too.

Suddenly I was working with Mel, which never felt quite right. Me, editing the guy who’d spent two decades at USA Today? I wasn’t sure about that.

He was always emailing me with story ideas. Even though his job took him to major league baseball parks around the country and interviews with the sport’s leading stars, he never stopped thinking about the next South Dakota baseball story he wanted to write.

The first major feature of his that I edited was about six longtime amateur baseball managers in South Dakota, and the dedication that it takes from them to keep a team going. We headlined it”Love for the Game” because it really seemed to capture the passion they all had for small-town baseball, but looking back I think it clearly reflected the passion of the writer just as much.

Brothers Rusty (left) and Mel Antonen as Lake Norden Lakers.

He worked through his illness, not only for his regular job on the East Coast but on pieces for South Dakota Magazine. Just last fall he finished a story that had long been discussed around Lake Norden but never written down. I’d grown up hearing about the time the great pitcher Satchel Paige came to Lake Norden on a barnstorming tour. The whole town was abuzz for the game, but it quickly turned to anxiousness when the time for the first pitch arrived and Satchel was nowhere to be found. Turns out that Satchel ran into two boys (one of whom happens to be my cousin) and they all went fishing together south of town. The rest of the story is in our September/October 2020 issue.

Sometimes Mel would email just to reminisce about playing baseball in Lake Norden. One day we got on the subject of the state amateur tournament. He told me he hit a double in his first state tournament at-bat in Madison.”I could hear Danny Olson’s play-by-play voice when I got to the plate. My knees were shaking,” he said. “I also remember striking out three or four times versus Dave Gassman of Canova in the quarterfinal game.”

Then there was the year the hometown Lakers lost to Eureka 6-5 in the semifinal game.”The game ended when manager Dale Jacobsen had our best base stealer, Mike Murphy, try to steal second with two outs in the ninth inning. He was out on a close call, and Jake argued and argued, following the umpire all the way to his car. Jake was still arguing as the umpire was taking off his equipment and putting it into the trunk.

“Chad Lavin, Steve Brown and I were pick-up players from Bryant’s Legion team. I didn’t play, but I’ll never forget the sinking feeling that goes with a season that ended like that.”

One day, he wrote to tell me about an amazing South Dakota connection he’d experienced in Washington, D.C.”I have been going to breakfast at a dive bar on the Hill for a long time,” he said.”The other day, I was there meeting a friend. The friend was late, and I ended up talking to one of the waitresses about baseball. She started talking about how her dad played ‘amateur baseball,’ but didn’t tell me where.

“‘You wouldn’t know where,’ she said.

Antonen and his son Emmett at the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

“But we continued to talk. I found out she was from Arlington, and her dad was Hall of Fame pitcher Chuck Petersen. She’s donated money to the Hall. Her dad and my dad were close friends, teammates, rivals.

“I would have never continued the conversation had she not said, ‘amateur baseball,’ which is, in my mind, is a phrase that you only hear in South Dakota.”

And, for much of the last year, there were health updates.”Survived one near death disease and COVID-19 is next to be knocked out,” he wrote last April 23 with the hashtag #finntough, ever proud of his Finnish heritage.

“I am in hospital, but I am feeling fixed and should be able to go home today,” he wrote a month later, while double checking details of the Satchel Paige story.

“Still battling HLH, but we hope to have it in remission by the end of November,” he said in the last message I ever received from him three months ago. But in the end the diseases proved too much for even a tough old Finlander from Lake Norden.

One of my favorite stories about Mel came from an interview he did with Cal Ripken, Jr., the longtime shortstop of the Baltimore Orioles and the holder of baseball’s longest consecutive games played record at 2,632. Mel asked Ripken about playing in Baltimore and what made it different from other major markets like New York and Boston. Did he ever think about playing somewhere else?”Mel,” Ripken said,”you just don’t understand what it’s like to play baseball in a small town.”

Mel knew it better than the Iron Man ever would have realized. It’s what brought him back every Fourth of July. He stayed connected to Lake Norden and to South Dakota, the people and the stories, and we’re all richer for it.

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Beyond the Chair

By Michael Zimny

James “JJ” Janis wants people with disabilities to come out into the open and talk about them, but he also wants people to see beyond the mechanized wheelchair that helps him get around. The Chair is Not Me is the title of a book of poems and prose he’s just published, which he hopes will spark a dialogue between diversely abled communities.

“My primary purpose is to foster an understanding between the diverse ability community and those that don’t have a disability,” Janis says.”It’s getting better but we need to do more work and by we, I’m talking all of us.”

Janis was born with cerebral palsy and grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation and in Rapid City. In his poem “My First Taste of Freedom,” he recalls that as a child, before he had a wheelchair, he sometimes got around in a little red wagon, “powered by my cousins’ legs.”

“We didn’t go very fast or far if people didn’t eat their morning eggs.”

Disabled people’s voices are rare in the media landscape, and consequently some of the issues they face aren’t widely discussed. Janis wants to change that with poems like “Unsung Heroes,” dedicated to direct support professionals (DSPs).

DSPs help disabled people, in countless ways, to go about their daily lives — taking them to appointments or visits with family and friends, helping them eat, shower, groom, get dressed. They are indispensable to the people they serve, not only because of the support they provide, but also because of intangibles like relationships and moral support.

“Their influence can ripple throughout our lives,” Janis writes.

DSPs are not highly valued by the market. They often receive at-or-near minimum wage pay. Turnover is high.

This places stress not only on the DSPs, but on the people they serve. “When I have somebody leave after a year, two, three, and even four years, it’s like a board pierced my heart,” Janis says. “When we lose someone, even if they’re just going to a different job, it’s like the loss of a family member.”

As an advocate, Janis is working to bring more attention to the work DSPs do. As a writer, he’s hoping to bring the issues faced by his community into the mainstream. He’s not shy about reaching out to high-profile people. He sent a book to George H.W. Bush. “I wrote him a letter thanking him for signing the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Janis says, “and told him about how civil his administration was compared to what was going on today.”

“When [President Trump] was running, he mocked a news reporter [who] had cerebral palsy, and it was kind of a disgrace. So, I was going to send one to President Trump to let him know that people with diverse abilities can do something, and he shouldn’t do that.”

The Chair is Not Me — which is illustrated by a group of diversely abled artists — is opening doors. Janis and some of the artists have been invited to present a show at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City next summer.

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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Doane’s Favorite Places

By Paul Higbee

Doane Robinson began his career in law, but eventually he became a poet, writer, publisher and state historian.

It’s an eight-minute walk in Pierre from Doane Robinson’s former home on Wynoka Street to the state capitol building, where he once had an office. Eight minutes, that is, if you walk with a sense of purpose.

And it is impossible to think of Doane Robinson ever moving without a sense of purpose. In the early days of South Dakota statehood he was South Dakota’s idea man, and he ranks among our most prolific writers. Usually men of letters leave behind books, and men with big ideas leave thinking that spurs others into action over time. Certainly Robinson’s legacy includes books and inspiration, but he also left South Dakota beautiful buildings at Gary, Pierre and Hisega, as well as a solid foundation for a department of state government. Oh yes … there’s also that sculpture of four presidential heads blasted from mountain granite near Keystone.

Robinson’s grandson, Will Doane Robinson, a retired teacher in Rapid City, remembers long walks along Wynoka and beyond with his grandfather in the 1930s.”A very, very nice man,” he describes him, and other neighborhood children concurred, often tagging along on walks. At the time they had no real idea of who their older friend was. Professionally Doane Robinson was a homesteader, teacher, lawyer, poet, editor and South Dakota’s first state historian. In his personal life he was a devoted family man who was widowed young. In his spare time he sometimes tinkered trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

Born into a farm family near Sparta, Wisconsin in 1856, he was christened Jonah LeRoy Robinson. Two childhood incidents impacted the rest of his life. First, younger sister Sadie couldn’t pronounce Jonah and called him Donah, later shortened to Doane. He answered to the name the rest of his life. The second event, says great-granddaughter Vicki McLain, was much darker. Typhoid fever hit his family. No one died, but the family struggled for years to pay medical bills, keeping them in poverty for most of Doane’s childhood. Forever after, Robinson believed debt had to be avoided if at all possible.

He possessed an amazing memory, claiming he could recall incidents that happened before age 2, and maybe even before age 1. Robinson seemed strangely attuned to history-in-the-making. He remembered his parents discussing news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the month after Robinson turned 4. His parents were Democrats and he recalled they were unimpressed with the Republican Lincoln. Later he heard talk of distant fighting as the Civil War played out, and Robinson remembered news of Lincoln’s assassination — his mother worried Democrats would take the blame. Much later Robinson decided”in some ways the truth about Lincoln had been withheld from me,” and he committed himself to reading political theory. He became a Republican but, he wrote,”will give my support to another party any minute I am convinced that the sum of happiness will be enhanced by it.”

During his teens he worked hard on the farm, was able to run the place on his own in the event of family emergencies, and he worked equally hard in school where he honed his love of words. In his early 20s he taught school, homesteaded near his brother’s place in Minnesota, and began studying law at the University of Wisconsin. All the while he fretted about Jennie Austin, a Wisconsin girl he greatly admired and found beautiful, but who was a teenager too young for him.

Robinson fell in love with a spot he saw while traveling on the Crouch railroad line. He named it Hisega, and soon build a lodge there featuring a wraparound porch. Photo by Paul Horsted

Of course, Jennie matured. She became a teacher herself. The two decided their affection was mutual in 1883, the same year Robinson got serious about finding legal work in western Minnesota or across the border in Dakota Territory. He hadn’t earned a law degree but had learned enough to feel confident he could offer quality legal services — not an unusual course of action at the time. He considered setting himself up in Ortonville, Minnesota, but didn’t like the town. Then he visited Watertown”and made up my mind I had found the place I was looking for.” He opened a Watertown law office in September of 1883.

Months later he bought one-third interest in the Watertown Daily Courier.”The law is a jealous mistress and must come before anything else in your life,” Robinson would one day counsel his son Will, an attorney. By buying into the newspaper and, in fact, becoming its editor, Robinson demonstrated an unwillingness to focus on the law alone. The result, he decided later, was failing to be”much shucks” as a lawyer.

In December of 1884, Watertown’s young lawyer and editor rode the rails to Wisconsin to marry Jennie. Then the couple came home to Dakota Territory. Son Harry was born in 1888, and Will came along in 1893. In those years Robinson learned he could supplement his family’s income nicely by selling poetry to magazines across the country. He actually attracted a national following. The Boston Herald noted that”perhaps no one of the younger poets of America has so quickly established himself in the hearts of the common people.” Robinson came to know South Dakota in part because of requests to travel from town to town and recite his verse. His dialect poetry, recreating the speech patterns of the state’s immigrants, often for humorous effect, was well received. He also toured other Midwestern states. Even after he became state historian, Robinson remained a poet, and found he could sometimes combine verse and historical interpretation. An example is this poem about W.H.H. Beadle, Civil War veteran and pioneering educator who championed South Dakota School and Public Lands for generating public education funds:

Man of vision! Man of mission,

Patriot, soldier, scholar, seer.

Man of action! Man of purpose! Duty led

in thy career.

Forward looking; self forgetting; unwaged

drudge for learning’s gain;

South Dakota reaps the harvest planted by

thy care and pain.

In 1894 he moved his young family to Gary, a railroad town in Deuel County, close to the Minnesota border. He bought the Gary Interstate newspaper.”Getting out an edition of the eight page newspaper was frequently a family affair,” son Will recalled in an excellent little biography of his father.”The press was an old Washington hand press.” Jennie positioned the newsprint in the press and Doane swung a big lever to apply pressure and make the imprint. At age 6 Harry removed the finished newspapers from the press and stacked them.

After the town of Gary lost its status as the seat of Deuel County, Robinson urged the state to locate the School for the Blind there. Today the campus is the Buffalo Ridge Resort and Business Center.

The year after the Robinsons moved to town, Gary lost county seat status to Clear Lake. But the new newspaper publisher had an idea: Why not lobby the state to build a School for the Blind on the former courthouse grounds? Robinson did some research and determined it cost South Dakota $2,000 per student, every year, to send children with visual impairments to out-of-state institutions, in the era when it was assumed students with disabilities learned best in segregated environments. Robinson’s idea won statewide support and ground was broken in 1899. Students arrived in 1900. Vicki McLain thinks perhaps there was more to her great-grandfather’s passion for the school than commerce for Gary.”When he was studying law in Wisconsin,” she says,”he temporarily lost sight, apparently because of severe eye strain. He recovered but never took eyesight for granted.”

Over the next several years the school evolved into a pretty campus a couple blocks north of Gary’s business district. Services moved to Aberdeen in 1961 and the campus fell into disrepair, but more than 40 years later Joe Kolbach completed a beautiful restoration, creating Buffalo Ridge Resort.

Even as he was publishing the Interstate and advocating for the school, Robinson nursed a pet project, one he believed in so much that he was willing to sometimes serve as an”unpaid drudge,” to borrow a phrase from his Beadle poem. The idea was a magazine, the Monthly South Dakotan, that would heavily emphasize the young state’s history. Issues were produced over a period of several years and wherever Robinson moved, the magazine went with him. The Robinsons moved to Yankton where he bought controlling interest in a morning paper, The Gazette, and then it was on to Sioux Falls where Robinson hoped to find more ad revenue for the Monthly South Dakotan. Next the family made Aberdeen its home, and Robinson published the Brown County Review.

ìHe had a thousand irons in the fire,” Will wrote. As for the Monthly South Dakotan, he added, it claimed a loyal readership willing to pay for subscriptions, but ad revenue constantly fell short. The publication folded in 1904, and by that time Robinson’s life had changed drastically. In 1901 he was selected Secretary of the new South Dakota State Historical Society, a branch of state government. Now he had the opportunity to publish articles of the sort he prepared for the Monthly South Dakotan, but at state expense. After a few years in the position his income would allow for a very comfortable lifestyle. It should have been a happy time, but in 1902 Jennie died of acute bronchitis. Who else but Robinson, with his head for historical dates, would note that Jennie died 19 years to the day after she and Doane decided they were in love?

Robinson advocated for the stately Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Pierre after World War I. It once housed the state’s history museum. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

ìOh, my dear boys,” Robinson later wrote his sons,”I can never tell you how dearly I loved your Mama, not only those nineteen years, but long before, and every moment since.” He was 45 and never remarried.

Sadie, the sister who gave him his name, moved in to help run the household. The family relocated to Pierre and Robinson arranged for construction of the home on Wynoka Street. Future governor and U.S. senator Peter Norbeck would be a neighbor on Wynoka, and became Robinson’s good friend and ally.

Robinson perhaps occasionally lost himself in work as he grieved Jennie. He helped plan the state capitol building and wrote 1905’s Brief History of South Dakota, more commonly called”the little red history book,” which for decades was the standard volume schools used to teach about South Dakota’s past. Most important, though, Robinson got the State Historical Society off to a strong start, publishing the first volumes of South Dakota Historical Collections, the biennial series of papers that most every South Dakota historian has referenced.

ìHis was the foundation we’ve built on ever since,” says Jay Vogt, current State Historical Society director.”In his time, he was much more hands-on than we’re able to be, doing most of the research and writing himself.”

Indeed, when something big developed, such as the discovery of the Verendrye plate that proved French trappers passed through the state in 1743, Robinson jumped into action and researched, wrote and edited until he had 300 pages for Historical Collections. He also gathered South Dakota newspapers and indexed them, along with government documents, and he took special interest in seeking out American Indian historical perspectives. He considered it a great honor, before his state historian years, to have interviewed Hunkpapa leader Gall, one of the victors at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

While no one ever questioned Robinson’s work ethic, he has sometimes been criticized for not being an academically trained historian.

ìBut you have to put that criticism in context,” says Vogt.”At that time, in all states, history organizations were kind of amateur clubs, made up of people who had interest and maybe connections to historical sources. Doane Robinson brought a wide range of professional experiences to his work, and he possessed great curiosity.”

For many years his office was on the capitol building’s ground floor, along with a little museum. When the legislature was in session, lawmakers knew the state’s best writer was close at hand if they struggled with a bill’s wording.

After railroad tracks spanned the Missouri River and were extended west to Rapid City in 1907, Robinson had easy access to the Black Hills for the first time. The region offered intriguing history, and it was a perfect place to relax. In 1908 Robinson arranged a camping adventure for 17 friends, relatives and Pierre colleagues. The party stepped off the Crouch Line train in a beautiful canyon west of Rapid City and pitched tents. Robinson loved making up words and announced he would call the spot Hisega, a name derived from the initials of six women in the group: Helen, Ida, Sadie, Ethel, Grace and Ada. Everyone loved the place, talked it up back in Pierre, and Robinson devised a time-share scheme. If enough people contributed $100, he would build a mountain lodge for them at Hisega. The big structure with wrap-around porches awaited visitors the next summer, and it still greets guests today.

A building of an entirely different style that stands as a Doane Robinson legacy is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, down the front steps and immediately across the street from the state capitol. Robinson pushed for the building after World War I, and it took more than a decade to raise funds and get the stately memorial finished. In addition to honoring South Dakotans who served and died in military service, the building housed the state’s history museum for many years and was usually referred to as the Robinson Museum.

Robinson dreamed of carving into Black Hills mountains. Newspapermen called the idea ridiculous, but Robinson partnered with Gutzon Borglum and history was made. Photo by S.D. Tourism

Of course, when it comes to tangible legacies, nothing tops Mount Rushmore Memorial.”My grandfather thought the Black Hills were beautiful, but that not enough people would visit just because of that,” says Will D. Robinson.”There had to be some other reason. I can show you the spot on the Needles Highway where his Model T Ford touring sedan got hot one day, and he sent my dad to bring water from a spring. When my dad got back to the car, my grandfather was looking at the Needles, thinking how they could be carved by a sculptor.”

That was 1923. Robinson talked to people who might help, especially Senator Norbeck, and sometimes took heat from South Dakota newspaper editors who considered the scheme ridiculous. But in short order internationally renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum was on board and in 1927, as Robinson looked on, President Calvin Coolidge was present for a ceremony launching the project. Only the location wasn’t the Needles but nearby Mount Rushmore because, Robinson’s grandson understood, the Needles spires contained too much feldspar and Borglum didn’t want to alter that stunning piece of God’s handiwork.

Borglum also didn’t want to carve figures related to the American West, as Robinson proposed, but instead presidents. In Borglum, Robinson met a man whose vast vision matched his own. In another way, though, the men were polar opposites. Borglum liked to move ahead without much thought about costs, while Robinson insisted on budgetary constraint. As an executive of the original association formed to oversee Mount Rushmore’s creation, it fell to Robinson to confront the sculptor at times about spending. He was happy to pretty much leave the project in 1929, content in knowing his role as instigator had been successful. Robinson was back at the mountain on July 4, 1930, as a speaker when the Washington head was dedicated. He was 73 and had retired as State Historical Society Secretary six years earlier.

In the 1930s Robinson had more time for his walks and young friends on Wynoka Street, and he kept writing. Unlike Borglum and Norbeck, he lived long enough to see Mount Rushmore in its final form. He also saw his son Will become head of the State Historical Society in 1946. Doane Robinson lived a few weeks past his 90th birthday and his grandson recalls his mind and memories were as sharp as ever toward the end. He had witnessed America’s evolution from Abraham Lincoln to the atomic age. No one observed South Dakota’s first half century more intently.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The West and the Universe

By Katie Hunhoff

Badger Clark lived and wrote at the Badger Hole, a cabin in Custer State Park.

Badger Clark would be packing his bags for a return home to Deadwood if the old poet were alive today, because that’s where this year’s South Dakota Festival of Books will be celebrated Sept. 24-27.

Our state’s annual book festival combines some of Badger’s favorite things — writers, readers and the fresh Black Hills air. It’s a special weekend in which local writers, readers and thinkers gather together to discuss and reflect from a regional point of view. This is already the 13th annual festival. The event has been alternating between Deadwood and Sioux Falls. Both are wonderful sites, but the northern Black Hills are especially tantalizing as the aspen and birch change color.

Badger Clark, South Dakota’s first poet laureate, had a special connection to Deadwood. He moved there in 1898 with his parents when he was 15 years old. His father, a Methodist minister, hoped the altitude would benefit Mrs. Clark’s tuberculosis. Deadwood was then a wild frontier town. But it was also an exciting place, rich with culture and home to a variety of people with interesting life stories. Clark attended school, loved to read and came to love nature. He was also able to spend time on his uncle’s Wyoming ranch, the beginning of his cowboy career.

Unfortunately the mountain air did not revive his mother’s health and she passed away shortly after they arrived. Three years later, the Rev. Clark remarried Rachel Anna Morris. She was a drama teacher from Iowa, and also a poet and magazine writer. No doubt her presence greatly shaped Clark’s life as a writer and thinker.

Clark graduated from Deadwood High School in 1902 and found himself at a crossroads. He eventually enrolled at Dakota Wesleyan University for one year. Then, either for adventure or money, he signed up to help with a colonizing effort in Cuba following the Spanish-American war. He was employed on a plantation that bred razorback hogs and he worked as a ranch hand and stevedore. He ended up in jail after his boss shot another plantation owner. A scrapbook of Clark’s Cuban adventures can be seen at the DWU library. While in the Cuban prison his imagination was sparked by the personalities of fellow prisoners. You’ll find some of Clark’s earliest poems in that Cuban scrapbook.

He continued his cowboy adventure near the Mexican border, where he took up drawing and started playing guitar. He began to write in earnest; inspired by the many people he met passing through the border country. In 1910 he returned to the Black Hills, first living in Hot Springs to take care of his aging parents. After they died, he moved to Custer State Park where he lived in the Badger Hole, a log cabin, until he died in 1957.

Clark was named South Dakota’s poet laureate in 1939, an honor he held for life. Someone once said that Clark’s talent was his ability to “tie the West to the Universe.” That’s a good way to describe what the book festival attendees and presenters do each year when they gather in September. We hope to see you there.