Tag: yankton

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What’s Worth Saving in South Dakota?

By Bernie Hunhoff

A foreigner visited Yankton last week and made the comment that the historic downtown area seemed rather dilapidated. He was polite. I don’t think that he thought he was saying something we didn’t already know. But do we?

He should have seen the 1903 courthouse when it was being braced by timbers (before we tore it down). He should have seen the empty storefronts that now comprise the successful Riverfront Event Center, a beautiful hotel, eatery and meeting place. He should have seen the Gurney’s property before the preservation work that has been accomplished in the last 24 months.

But maybe we should also take a look through his eyes. Could we do better?

Should it concern us that we don’t practice preservation for preservation’s sake? We are not likely to save a building just because we value it; just because we think a future generation might find it interesting. That’s a gene we might have acquired from the Dust Bowl. Don’t fix up what might just blow away next year.

Despite that practical prairie approach, we’ve seen towns across South Dakota accomplish some laudable historic development. Our largest cities have led the way, not surprisingly. Rapid City and Sioux Falls have downtown districts that could rival any comparable city in America. Europeans might even find them interesting. As for smaller towns, Deadwood and Mobridge have accomplished much. Deadwood’s gambling revenues have made its progress possible, but Mobridge made it happen the old-fashioned way. Or is gambling the old way?

As for Yankton, this town has looked far worse at times. Beautification efforts and architectural improvements have been considerable. Bars and restaurants seem to thrive downtown. Retail isn’t as strong as we would like, but our downtown is still blessed with furniture stores, a fine hardware establishment, two pharmacies and several other smaller but vitally important speciality shops. And the downtown is a media center for the entire region — featuring two newspapers and two of the city’s three radio stations.

City taxpayers have invested several million dollars in improvements. The riverfront area has been transformed as a park. It’s hard to find any existing critic of the expensive conversion of the Meridian Bridge to pedestrian and bike traffic.

As we write this, city leaders are making plans to better connect the walking bridge to the downtown business district. The Masonic Temple is getting a facelift. The historic old Elks Lodge, vacant for many years, is about to be auctioned. Governor Daugaard got $6 million from the legislature to restore a few old buildings on the state hospital campus and then raze a number of others.

We’ve had successes and failures. A city of 14,000 can only do so much.

Should we expect more of our towns and our cities and ourselves in South Dakota? Or is the exercise world’s slogan “use it or lose it” good enough to double as our policy for historic preservation?

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Muddy Fun Run

By Rebecca Johnson

The first annual Lewis & Clark Adventure Race was held west of Yankton this past Saturday. It’s an obstacle-style 5k held on the Lewis & Clark Scout Camp.

I love running 5k races but when I first heard about this one I was not interested. Potential obstacles like climbing over a wall, belly crawling through mud under electrified wire and jumping into ice water sounded horrible. I prefer to stay relatively clean and dry on my runs. I don’t even like outdoor swimming unless it’s over 90 degrees. Why would I intentionally jump into ice water? Well, a friend invited me to run and I realized I didn’t want to miss out on this extreme experience with her.

I got an e-newsletter a week before the race showing a weight-lifting plan to help you get ready for obstacle-course racing. It hadn’t occurred to me to do any training besides running and by then it was too late! What was I getting myself into? By the time Saturday morning rolled around I was anxious to see what torture awaited me.

The race was challenging, but really quite fun. The course was mostly hilly trail-running with a small camp of obstacles in the middle and a few more toward the end. The mud was cold, and even smelly, but I had a blast. And I felt a sense of accomplishment from completing obstacles like carrying a big piece of driftwood, climbing a rope ladder and sliding down a fireman’s pole. Oh, and the wire wasn’t really electrified. There was just a sign saying”Danger: High Voltage” to scare you. What a relief!

If you’re considering doing a mud run or adventure race, gather a group of friends and go for it! The race probably isn’t as hard as you think and you’ll have an amazing time with stories to tell.

Here are some upcoming obstacle-style races around the state —

Black Hills Mud Run — Sturgis, June 1 & September 14

Dakota Mud Run — Hot Springs, July 6

MudChug — Sioux Falls, August 3

South Dakota Mudathlon — Sioux Falls, August 24

Rumble on the Ranch — Watertown, September 7

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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.

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Who’s Working on Your Street?

By Bernie Hunhoff

Too often, we forget to appreciate the diverse and talented people who make our South Dakota business and professional communities. Oh, sure, we know those who run for mayor and school board or chair the United Way. But many others labor quietly in the background. We assume they will be here for a long time. And so we take them for granted.

Such was the case with Camtu Thi Tran. She and her husband Robert operated King Dragon Restaurant on Fourth Street in Yankton for many years. They have been successful restauranteurs but we often thought, over egg drop soup or wonton chicken, that with Camtu as hostess they might have been millionaires in downtown Chicago or Los Angeles. She was a great ambassador for Yankton.

She was 39 years old when she died April 3. Two Buddhist monks came from Rochester, Minn., to conduct a funeral service. They wore robes of gold and orange. A kindly fellow in a blue jacket translated at times.

Robert and the children, Roland and Calida, spoke of their lives in Yankton. The restaurant will continue, but it will be different without Camtu. They need and deserve the continued support of the community that has supported them so many years.

This young lady’s untimely death is also a wake-up call for all of us to search out and show appreciation to other unsung heroes and heroines who make our cities work on a daily basis — whether they are serving in businesses, hospitals, prisons, hardware stores, insurance offices or all the other nooks and crannies that make a community. We look for them when we travel to explore cities for features in South Dakota Magazine. But like everyone else, we take them for granted here at home. Camtu worked just a block from our publishing offices, yet we saw her perhaps once a month.

The mourners at her funeral did not understand much of what the Buddhist monks said, but at one point the translator in blue noted that they were speaking of the five precepts of Buddhism — respect for all life, do not steal, avoid sexual misconduct, do not lie and abstain from drug and alcohol abuse.

All good principles. We mean no disrespect when we suggest that a sixth might be to do good and honest labor that makes other people happy.

Camtu was hardly known outside the King Dragon. But she was immensely popular with anyone and everyone who came to her family’s restaurant for nourishment and fellowship. She set a standard.

And our loss makes us wonder how many other quiet treasures are working down the street today.

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Is This Jack McCall?

By John Andrews

When you hear the name Jack McCall, there’s probably one image that comes to mind: a black and white photo of a man with black hair, black mustache, black jacket and seated, facing the camera with his bent left arm resting on a table. We’ve come to accept that this is a photograph of McCall, but historians in Yankton, where was McCall was executed on this day in 1877 for the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, are skeptical.

I never gave the photo a second thought until our book, South Dakota Outlaws and Scofflaws, was released in August. I wrote a chapter on McCall, which features the image in question at the bottom of page 41. Not long after we finished the book, Yankton historian Bob Hanson visited our office and listed five or six reasons why he believes the man in the photo is not Jack McCall. The assassin’s age and various descriptions of his physical appearance don’t match, he said. McCall was called”Crooked Nose,” or”Broken Nose” Jack, and the nose on the photographed man doesn’t seem that crooked. Plus, McCall was no more than 25 years old when he died. The photographed man appears to be older.

A few months later I mentioned the controversy to Jim Lane, another Yankton historian who is married to our circulation director, Jana. He deepened the mystery by pointing out that no other image of McCall or his hanging has ever surfaced.

McCall’s trial and execution in Yankton were pivotal moments in Dakota history. His trial helped established the territorial court’s jurisdiction over Deadwood, and his execution — which was well reported attended by as many as 1,000 people — was Dakota Territory’s first. It seems astounding that no verified image (a photograph, sketch or woodcutting) has ever been seen, especially since Yankton was home to expertly trained photographer Stanley J. Morrow.

Morrow was an Ohio native who learned his trade as an apprentice to famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. Around 1868 he moved to Yankton and started a photography studio. His passion was as a traveling photographer, and his summers were spent traveling to forts, towns and reservations along the Missouri River making portraits and landscape scenes.

In the summer of 1876, around the same time McCall shot Hickok at Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, Morrow left for the Black Hills to photograph the gold rush. He also spent time with Gen. George Crook’s troops, who had battled Indian tribes in the Slim Buttes of far northwestern South Dakota.

He arrived at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska in October 1876 and spent a month there photographing Indian leaders like Red Cloud. It is believed that Morrow returned to Yankton in mid-December, just a week or two after McCall’s trial had concluded. McCall spent January and February of 1877 in jail downtown, but either Morrow never attempted to photograph him or McCall never granted permission.

Even if Morrow wasn’t in Yankton, his wife Isa had the expertise and opportunity to capture an image of McCall. After the Morrows moved to Yankton, Stanley taught Isa how to make photographs, and she ran the studio while her husband was gone on photographic tours of Dakota.

Morrow left Yankton in 1883. Many of his images were lost in a fire, but about 500 that we know of have survived. And maybe an image of his, or another traveling photographer, depicting McCall has survived tucked away in someone’s attic or basement. Pay attention the next time you’re rifling through old boxes. You might be holding a never-before-seen piece of Dakota history.

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Museum Pieces

Lori Holmberg, Dakota Discovery Museum director, says Gilfillan’s wagon is a permanent exhibit.

By Katie Hunhoff

The coming winter will force South Dakotans to seek indoor amusement, and high on our list should be a visit to local museums. You might be surprised at what you find. Our writers found all sorts of treasures when we did a search for our state’s most interesting and unusual museum artifacts.

Right beneath our noses, in our hometown of Yankton where we publish South Dakota Magazine, we found a Native American pipe bag with an amazing story at the Dakota Territorial Museum. The bag was the centerpiece of a collection of Indian artifacts gathered by Andrew J. Faulk, a 1860s trader and later the third governor of Dakota Territory. Crow Indians probably made the tanned, 43-inch long deer hide bag.

The bag’s recent history is almost as intriguing as its past. In 1995, it was stolen from the museum. For eight years, Yankton County Historical Society board member and artifact collector Larry Ness carried a photograph of the bag, and asked other collectors if they’d seen it. He found it in New York in 2003, and after some legal maneuvering he was able to bring the pipe bag home to the Yankton museum, where it is once again on display.

The Thoen Stone, located at the Adams Museum in Deadwood, is another prized museum piece with an interesting story. The stone is an 8 1/2 by 10 inch scrap of sandstone, purportedly found near Spearfish in 1887 by Louis Thoen. Inscribed on both sides is a message that is still the subject of controversy. The rough script describes how a band of seven men found”all the gold we could carry” in the northern Black Hills, and then were killed by Indian warriors — all except for the writer, Ezra Kind.

Kind supposedly wrote that he was out of food,”without a gun and hiding for his life.” The inscription is dated 1834, 40 years before the Custer expedition into the Hills. The fate of Mr. Kind is unknown, as is the validity of the stone itself.

Another famous stone can be found at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre — and its validity is certain. In 1742, Pierre Gaultier de la Verendrye sent his sons from Hudson Bay in Canada to find a water route to China. On foot and horseback, Louis-Joseph and Francois trekked west for over a year — until their Indian guides refused to go farther. The French-Canadians did not find a route to the sea, but they were among the first Europeans to see the Dakota plains. Camping with Indians along the Missouri on March 30, 1743, they buried a lead plate on a hilltop near the mouth of the Bad River to commemorate their journey. Three teenagers found the Verendryes’ partially-exposed lead plate in February of 1913. The artifact helped historians map the Verendryes’ route in their search for the Pacific.

Some of other amazing discoveries we found at local museums include paintings, like the Harvey Dunn originals at Brookings’ South Dakota Art Museum, sculptures like Borglum’s Statue of Lincoln at Keystone’s Borglum Historical Center and more Native American treasures like parfleche containers at Akta Lakota Museum in Chamberlain. Sometimes the museum building itself is a treasure, like the Pettigrew House in Sioux Falls or Adams Museum and House in Deadwood.

Ranchers will be nostalgic about Archer Gilfillan’s sheepherder wagon at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell. The early-day”mobile home,” a double floored and heated covered wagon, came to the museum 50 years ago. Gilfillan, a popular Harding County writer and speaker, was born in White Earth, Minn. in 1886, the son of an Episcopal missionary to the Ojibway Indians. Gilfillan studied Latin and Greek in prestigious universities and traveled in Europe. He returned to the West to homestead in Harding County. That venture failed and he worked for other ranchers, keeping a journal of the people and events he encountered. He gave a speech about sheep, coyote and human behavior at a wool growers’ convention at Helena, Mont., in 1924 called”Secret Sorrows of a Sheepherder,” and it was so well received he compiled his stories into a book, Sheep: Life on the South Dakota Range.

Every South Dakota museum, large and small, has treasures awaiting us. What better time to discover them than on a cold winter’s day?

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Fall Festivities

By Rebecca Johnson

The summer’s drought has been tough on area farmers. Our orchards weren’t immune, but Hebda Family Produce (formerly Garrity’s), east of Yankton, is still open for their fall Apple Fest.

My husband and I stopped out for the festivities last Sunday. They have plenty of apples to buy in their shop, but picking your own is not available due to the dry growing season. The pumpkins are doing fine, though. $8 gets you admission for the hay rack ride out to the pumpkin patch, the bale maze, playground, and a little cup of corn to feed the goats. My previous goat experience is limited, but Hebda’s were rather endearing. Some were quite cute and others were the “so ugly they’re cute” variety.

If goats aren’t your thing, it’s still worth the stop for their gift and snack shop. The cozy store was bustling with families sipping hot cider and devouring warm apple pie or caramel apple slices. We picked up a quarter peck of Connell Red apples then made mental note of the jams, jellies, and salsa for the hard to buy people on our Christmas list.

Apple Fest is each weekend in October. Visit Hebda’s Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 – 5:30 p.m. Call (605) 665-2806 for more details.

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WE HAVE AN INDUSTRY!

In this state of 50 million acres you might think there’s not much of a creative publishing industry beyond the nuts-and-bolts newspaper industry, but you’d be wrong. South Dakota Magazine hosted a Plains Publishers’ Conference on Thursday (Sept. 13) and a crowd of writers, photographers, designers and publishers showed up. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.