2010 Summer-Fall Issue | Archives | Feature Stories

Conservation: Restoring land to native grasses
By Bruce Hope 1999

     Dave Konechne is one of the beneficiaries of the cooperative efforts of several conservation groups, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state Department of Game, Fish and Parks, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Ducks Unlimited, and the Brule-Buffalo Conservation District.
      In June, on Konechne’s land south of Kimball, a new dam was built, 6,000 trees were planted, and 300 acres were restored to native grasses. Two years ago, Konechne undertook a similar project on another area of his property. Today that area looks like pristine prairie grasses and wildflowers surrounding a natural lake.
      Like a similar project at Ed Shrake’s place south of Chamberlain, the Konechne project is cost-shared between the landowner and the conservation groups.
      Benefits of grass seeding and dam building are many: slow down of run-off, flood control, sediment control, ground water recharge, and a filtering out of pesticides. They are also a big help in livestock watering, and they provide excellent new wildlife habitat.
      “The ponds help everything from frogs to deer,” Konechne says. “All resident wildlife will benefit.”
      The conservation alliance built four such dams in the district this year. They have approved eight more to be built this year and next year, depending on weather and other factors, according to Brule-Buffalo Conservation District program manager Bob Hosek. There are 12 additional interested landowners in the district.
      The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), through FSA and the NRCS offices, also planted 15.2 acres of trees in a 50 percent cost-share with Konechne.
      Konechne rented the Brule-Buffalo Conservation District (BBCD) Truax drill to plant native grasses on over 300 acres. Grasses include big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, green needle, side oats grama, and Indian grass, plus several varieties of wildflowers.
      It takes a very special (and expensive) drill to plant the native grasses and wildflowers.
      “Depth is critical,” Konechne says. “If the seeds are planted over 1/2 inch deep, they won’t germinate.”
      The $15,000 drills are designed to put the fluffy seed just below the surface at optimum depth, according to Boyd Schultz, wildlife biologist for Game, Fish and Parks. Sharing the cost of the 40 drills in use throughout the state were GF&P, Fish and Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited, and the BBCD. Around 45,000 acres were seeded last year.
      Such partnerships are becoming more common nowadays because of the funding advantages. Such a group has a better chance of getting grants with several reputable entities signed onto a given project. The district usually coordinates the grants, while F&W and NRCS provide technical support. The district spearheads a project, receives funds, and disburses funds to contractors and landowners.
      Larger grants are sought and administered by the State Association of Conservation Districts.
      Not only are the drills expensive, but so too are the seeds themselves. Konechne says, “There are not too many people into native grass seed production. They’re a little harder to harvest than the grain crops.
      Schultz notes that “The native grasses are not that easy to establish.”
      “They get a lot of competition for moisture from the green foxtail and the pigeon grass,” he says.
      “He’s really got a good establishment here,” Schultz says, surveying Konechne’s plots of native grasses last week. It’s unusual to see the big bluestem this tall,” he adds. “In another year, he’ll have this just like native prairie.”
      Konechne notes that range people call big bluestem the “king of the grasses.”
      “These kinds of grasses provide excellent wildlife cover,” Schultz says, “while being the food of preference for cattle.”
      This project on Konechne land is 300 acres. He has another 200 acres that were seeded over two years ago. These are perennial grasses being planted, and they must compete with the annual grasses and weeds. Annuals come up each year from seed, while perennials are established from seed but regrow themselves from the root system after that (they don’t have to be re-seeded). Once established, the perennials provide continous and excellent grazing, a longterm benefit to landowners.
      Schultz says that Konechne’s new crop of prairie grasses and flowers is spectacular, and should be chest or head high by next season, catching up with the crop planted two years ago. The reason for the difference, Konechne believes, is the introduction of a new chemical Plateau, which is labeled/allowed for CRP use in South Dakota.
      “It inhibits the foxtail, stresses a lot of broadleafs and thistle, and controls leafy spurge,” Konechne says.
      Konechne has a cornfield adjoining the project which he will turn over to native grasses next year.
      The district probably put down weed barrier on 80 acres of trees this year, Dave Jones says. The weed barrier is a woven fabric that allows air and moisture to pass through, but keeps the weeds from sprouting. Usually in the planting of tree stands, holes are cut in the fabric for the saplings to poke through.
      In Konechne’s project, the trees were planted in a semi-circle - following the contour of the land - rather than in straight rows. This keeps the grove from becoming a “predator alley” for the foxes.
      In the new tree stand (one of four plots) planted to the west of the new watering hole, the rows were planted with the following trees, east to west: 1) dogwood, 2) cedar 3) currant, 4) chokecherry, 5) Rocky Mountain juniper, 6) hawthorne, 7) plum and buffalo berry, 8) Rocky Mountain juniper, 9) sumac and snowberry, 10) cedar, 11) hawthorne, 12) Juneberry and currant, and 13) Rocky Mountain juniper.
      Konechne says that a landowner talks with the conservation district manager, the state forester, and several other people in the process of coming up with a tree plan.
      The stands in this project are low-height, shrub planting. The plots are designed for wildlife, planted close together for dense cover, and curved in ragged semi-circles rather than in a straight rows (to prevent creation of “predator alleys”)
      Jones says the survival rate of such planted tree stands is over 80 percent. He explains that a tree plot should lay fallow for at least a year before planting. He says that hot-windy weather can add more stress to trees already stressed from being torn out of the ground in one place, put in a cooler up to six months (at 26 degrees), and then replanted in the spring and summer. (allows them to break dormancy 34-36 degrees
      The seedlings are lifted from the ground between the time that they go dormant and the time that the ground freezes (that time is near, Jones says) at the nursery. “This has a lot to do with the survivability of the trees,” Hosek says, “when they are lifted and how they are taken care of.”
      Jones says the district planted over 80,000 trees on 150 acres this year. (Jones was a quality assurance manager at a precision machine shop in Yankton until he and his wife Kathy decided to go into semi-retirement, and return to Chamberlain where he was born and raised.)
     
      Jones says orders are already going in for next year’s trees. Big Sioux Nursery, who supplies the district with saplings, wants their orders in by Dec. 1 for the tree planting the following April, May and June.
      According to NRCS specifications, a minimum of five percent of a tract of land should go into shrub planting (in order that the highest rating be achieved), according to Bob Hosek.
     
      The project will start showing benefits in about three years, Konechne says. The longevity of the dam, tree stand and native prairie will be anywhere from 30 to 50 years, according to Jones.
      “Some of the trees will still be there in 60 years,” Hosek says.
      “These are all species native to South Dakota,” Konechne says.
      According to Konechne, the wildflowers include: partridge pea, bundleflower, black-eyed Susan, purple prairie clover, plains coreopsis, Mexican hat (and other coneflowers), blanket flowers, and lead plants.
     
      The dams are built with a pipe in the downstream side acting as the primary spillway. A graded area to the side of the dam is the emergency spillway, which will take water around the dam and down the spillway so it doesn’t wash out the dam in the event of heavy rains.
      The dam builders take “borrow material” from a center spot in the excavation to create a hole 12-14 feet deep to retain water.
      Konechne says there are a lot of ducks making use of the new facility already.
      “In about three years,” Schultz says, “this will look like a natural wetland.”
      “Without the cooperative effort,” he emphasizes, “this kind of project would never get done.”
      According to Schultz, the hope is that the landowner sees the benefit of continuing the conservation practices over time. For the landowner, the primary function of the dam, for example, is livestock water. It is usually built in an area which helps the livestock owner distribute his grazing more evenly. Oftentimes, Schultz explains, the landowner builds a grazing system to rotate cattle within pastures. Grasses mature at different times, and it stands to reason that the balanced diet would be better for the animal. One popular system is the four-pasture/twice-over system.
      “The cattle virtually move themselves,” Schultz says, “out of the pasture that is getting grazed bare, and over to the next pasture where the grass is fresh, thick and palatable.”
      “You have better utilization of the grasses,” he adds, noting that the owner controls the types of grasses the cattle eat and in what sequence. “This is where it is important to have a mixture of cool-season and warm-season native grasses.”
     
      Konechne and Schultz dispel a common misconception about predators. “There is nothing better for the establishment and maintenance of ground nesting birds (pheasants, ducks, etc.) than coyote.”
      You take out the coyote, Konechne says, and the fox, skunks, and coons proliferate. They spend part of their lives searching specifically for eggs. This is where the big losses come in. While the coyote will sometimes eat eggs, he also chases and kills the predators who really do the damage to the bird population.
     
      When a landowner goes into an agreement with groups of conservation agencies, he signs what is called an extension agreement with Fish and Wildlife, a 10-year agreement giving them the right to come in and inspect - and sometimes repair - the projects over time.
      Schultz says that South Dakota signs the most extension agreements per year of any state in the country, and that South Dakota has signed more total agreements than any other state.
     
      The rumor is that they’re going to have another CRP sign-up in January.
     
     
      by Bruce Hope, editor
      Dave Konechne is one of the beneficiaries of the cooperative efforts of several conservation groups, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state Department of Game, Fish and Parks, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Ducks Unlimited, and the Brule-Buffalo Conservation District.
      In June, on Konechne’s land south of Kimball, a new dam was built, 6,000 trees were planted, and 300 acres were restored to native grasses. Two years ago, Konechne undertook a similar project on another area of his property. Today that area looks like pristine prairie grasses and wildflowers surrounding a natural lake.
      Like a similar project at Ed Shrake’s place south of Chamberlain, the Konechne project is cost-shared between the landowner and the conservation groups.
      Benefits of grass seeding and dam building are many: slow down of run-off, flood control, sediment control, ground water recharge, and a filtering out of pesticides. They are also a big help in livestock watering, and they provide excellent new wildlife habitat.
      “The ponds help everything from frogs to deer,” Konechne says. “All resident wildlife will benefit.”
      The conservation alliance built four such dams in the district this year. They have approved eight more to be built this year and next year, depending on weather and other factors, according to Brule-Buffalo Conservation District program manager Bob Hosek. There are 12 additional interested landowners in the district.
      The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), through FSA and the NRCS offices, also planted 15.2 acres of trees in a 50 percent cost-share with Konechne.
      Konechne rented the Brule-Buffalo Conservation District (BBCD) Truax drill to plant native grasses on over 300 acres. Grasses include big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, green needle, side oats grama, and Indian grass, plus several varieties of wildflowers.
      It takes a very special (and expensive) drill to plant the native grasses and wildflowers.
      “Depth is critical,” Konechne says. “If the seeds are planted over 1/2 inch deep, they won’t germinate.”
      The $15,000 drills are designed to put the fluffy seed just below the surface at optimum depth, according to Boyd Schultz, wildlife biologist for Game, Fish and Parks. Sharing the cost of the 40 drills in use throughout the state were GF&P, Fish and Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited, and the BBCD. Around 45,000 acres were seeded last year.
      Such partnerships are becoming more common nowadays because of the funding advantages. Such a group has a better chance of getting grants with several reputable entities signed onto a given project. The district usually coordinates the grants, while F&W and NRCS provide technical support. The district spearheads a project, receives funds, and disburses funds to contractors and landowners.
      Larger grants are sought and administered by the State Association of Conservation Districts.
      Not only are the drills expensive, but so too are the seeds themselves. Konechne says, “There are not too many people into native grass seed production. They’re a little harder to harvest than the grain crops.
      Schultz notes that “The native grasses are not that easy to establish.”
      “They get a lot of competition for moisture from the green foxtail and the pigeon grass,” he says.
      “He’s really got a good establishment here,” Schultz says, surveying Konechne’s plots of native grasses last week. It’s unusual to see the big bluestem this tall,” he adds. “In another year, he’ll have this just like native prairie.”
      Konechne notes that range people call big bluestem the “king of the grasses.”
      “These kinds of grasses provide excellent wildlife cover,” Schultz says, “while being the food of preference for cattle.”
      This project on Konechne land is 300 acres. He has another 200 acres that were seeded over two years ago. These are perennial grasses being planted, and they must compete with the annual grasses and weeds. Annuals come up each year from seed, while perennials are established from seed but regrow themselves from the root system after that (they don’t have to be re-seeded). Once established, the perennials provide continous and excellent grazing, a longterm benefit to landowners.
      Schultz says that Konechne’s new crop of prairie grasses and flowers is spectacular, and should be chest or head high by next season, catching up with the crop planted two years ago. The reason for the difference, Konechne believes, is the introduction of a new chemical Plateau, which is labeled/allowed for CRP use in South Dakota.
      “It inhibits the foxtail, stresses a lot of broadleafs and thistle, and controls leafy spurge,” Konechne says.
      Konechne has a cornfield adjoining the project which he will turn over to native grasses next year.
      The district probably put down weed barrier on 80 acres of trees this year, Dave Jones says. The weed barrier is a woven fabric that allows air and moisture to pass through, but keeps the weeds from sprouting. Usually in the planting of tree stands, holes are cut in the fabric for the saplings to poke through.
      In Konechne’s project, the trees were planted in a semi-circle - following the contour of the land - rather than in straight rows. This keeps the grove from becoming a “predator alley” for the foxes.
      In the new tree stand (one of four plots) planted to the west of the new watering hole, the rows were planted with the following trees, east to west: 1) dogwood, 2) cedar 3) currant, 4) chokecherry, 5) Rocky Mountain juniper, 6) hawthorne, 7) plum and buffalo berry, 8) Rocky Mountain juniper, 9) sumac and snowberry, 10) cedar, 11) hawthorne, 12) Juneberry and currant, and 13) Rocky Mountain juniper.
      Konechne says that a landowner talks with the conservation district manager, the state forester, and several other people in the process of coming up with a tree plan.
      The stands in this project are low-height, shrub planting. The plots are designed for wildlife, planted close together for dense cover, and curved in ragged semi-circles rather than in a straight rows (to prevent creation of “predator alleys”)
      Jones says the survival rate of such planted tree stands is over 80 percent. He explains that a tree plot should lay fallow for at least a year before planting. He says that hot-windy weather can add more stress to trees already stressed from being torn out of the ground in one place, put in a cooler up to six months (at 26 degrees), and then replanted in the spring and summer. (allows them to break dormancy 34-36 degrees
      The seedlings are lifted from the ground between the time that they go dormant and the time that the ground freezes (that time is near, Jones says) at the nursery. “This has a lot to do with the survivability of the trees,” Hosek says, “when they are lifted and how they are taken care of.”
      Jones says the district planted over 80,000 trees on 150 acres this year. (Jones was a quality assurance manager at a precision machine shop in Yankton until he and his wife Kathy decided to go into semi-retirement, and return to Chamberlain where he was born and raised.)
     
      Jones says orders are already going in for next year’s trees. Big Sioux Nursery, who supplies the district with saplings, wants their orders in by Dec. 1 for the tree planting the following April, May and June.
      According to NRCS specifications, a minimum of five percent of a tract of land should go into shrub planting (in order that the highest rating be achieved), according to Bob Hosek.
     
      The project will start showing benefits in about three years, Konechne says. The longevity of the dam, tree stand and native prairie will be anywhere from 30 to 50 years, according to Jones.
      “Some of the trees will still be there in 60 years,” Hosek says.
      “These are all species native to South Dakota,” Konechne says.
      According to Konechne, the wildflowers include: partridge pea, bundleflower, black-eyed Susan, purple prairie clover, plains coreopsis, Mexican hat (and other coneflowers), blanket flowers, and lead plants.
     
      The dams are built with a pipe in the downstream side acting as the primary spillway. A graded area to the side of the dam is the emergency spillway, which will take water around the dam and down the spillway so it doesn’t wash out the dam in the event of heavy rains.
      The dam builders take “borrow material” from a center spot in the excavation to create a hole 12-14 feet deep to retain water.
      Konechne says there are a lot of ducks making use of the new facility already.
      “In about three years,” Schultz says, “this will look like a natural wetland.”
      “Without the cooperative effort,” he emphasizes, “this kind of project would never get done.”
      According to Schultz, the hope is that the landowner sees the benefit of continuing the conservation practices over time. For the landowner, the primary function of the dam, for example, is livestock water. It is usually built in an area which helps the livestock owner distribute his grazing more evenly. Oftentimes, Schultz explains, the landowner builds a grazing system to rotate cattle within pastures. Grasses mature at different times, and it stands to reason that the balanced diet would be better for the animal. One popular system is the four-pasture/twice-over system.
      “The cattle virtually move themselves,” Schultz says, “out of the pasture that is getting grazed bare, and over to the next pasture where the grass is fresh, thick and palatable.”
      “You have better utilization of the grasses,” he adds, noting that the owner controls the types of grasses the cattle eat and in what sequence. “This is where it is important to have a mixture of cool-season and warm-season native grasses.”
     
      Konechne and Schultz dispel a common misconception about predators. “There is nothing better for the establishment and maintenance of ground nesting birds (pheasants, ducks, etc.) than coyote.”
      You take out the coyote, Konechne says, and the fox, skunks, and coons proliferate. They spend part of their lives searching specifically for eggs. This is where the big losses come in. While the coyote will sometimes eat eggs, he also chases and kills the predators who really do the damage to the bird population.
     
      When a landowner goes into an agreement with groups of conservation agencies, he signs what is called an extension agreement with Fish and Wildlife, a 10-year agreement giving them the right to come in and inspect - and sometimes repair - the projects over time.
      Schultz says that South Dakota signs the most extension agreements per year of any state in the country, and that South Dakota has signed more total agreements than any other state.
     
      The rumor is that they’re going to have another CRP sign-up in January.
     
      by Bruce Benham, editor
      “We started fee hunting in 1977 - that’s what really precipitated the idea of the Red Barn,” says Dave Konechne. “We wanted to have lodging for hunters, but realized that it would cost too much to have a facility just for seasonal use.”
      The Red Barn is a hunting lodge/bed and breakfast located near I-90, southwest of Kimball, and owned and operated by Dave and Barbara Konechne.
      We always had hunters,” Konechne says, “but that year they asked us to leave some strips for pheasants.” After the drought the year before (1976), Konechne said they would need to harvest every acre. The hunters suggested that they pay the Konechnes to leave some strips for the birds.
      “I didn’t like the idea of getting paid,” Konechne admits, “but they needed a place to hunt and, of course, my banker has this silly notion that his note should be paid … so, now the pheasants are helping to pay.”
      The large, red, hip-roofed building was moved from some land Konechne had been leasing from a neighbor three miles south. The landlord wanted to get rid of the 70-year-old, 12-stall horse barn.
      They poured the concrete in February of 1990 and moved the barn in April. By October, the place was full of hunters. They had hunters helping to hang the doors on their own bedrooms, Dave says.
      “Barbara kind of took over the farm while I was doing the construction,” Dave said, adding that she usually had help from a couple of their 16 children (eight girls, eight boys). (Their oldest son John, who managed a hog operation, was killed in a mysterious auto accident in 1992.)
      Everyone’s a celebrity -
      even horses
      Last week, the Red Barn was hosting a three-day first-call theological retreat for a group of area Lutheran pastors which included Bishop Andrea DeGroot-Nesdahl, Sioux Falls. They had a Pharmco supper coming up the following week. The Konechnes - Dave and Barbara - stay busy pretty much year-round with mini-conventions, weddings, birthday parties, family reunions, holiday parties, and anniversaries. They say that traveling guests are also a good part of their business.
      The Red Barn is listed in the national horse stabling directory. Konechne explains that horses need to bed down too - they can be kept only so many hours standing in a rail car or a truck. The Konechnes are equipped to stable a half dozen horses indoors, and have stabled herds of 8-10 at a crack.
      He says that travelers are often a little reluctant to go to fair grounds, rodeo grounds, or sale barns with their horses because they are unsure of health and safety factors. Vandalism is a concern.
      The clientele
      Konechne says all the people who come to stay at the Red Barn are very interesting - lawyers, doctors, factory workers, farmers, and every other vocation. “We get a very diverse group - rich, poor, kids, retired people - it is a really unique cross-section of people. I value all of these customers quite highly.”
      “We don’t really distinguish between ordinary people and celebrities,” Dave says. “Barb and I have always tried to satisfy everybody - everybody who walks through the door is treated with the same respect.”
      Konechne mentions a “plain old good guy” named Paul Duffy, a factory worker from Juneau, Wis., who has come back to the Red Barn so regularly that he is well-known around the Kimball area. “He loves it around here,” Dave says. “He’s famous around here as a conservationist - he loves hunting and fishing, and all sports.”
      Konechne himself is quite a conservationist, planting 10-20,000 trees every year on his property. “The Conservation District [Konechne is chairperson of the District’s Board of Supervisors] plants five to 10 acres on the farm every year.”
      The Konechnes get many of the same people every year, and Dave says they are probably entering the stage of being overbooked. “We can’t really take many more hunters,” he says.
      “We could still use a few more retreats, family reunions, and the like,” he adds.
      “People are very relaxed, enjoying themselves here - that creates a really good atmosphere,” he says. “I really like to see the new people come out. Say there’s someone missing, and there’s a new person to fill in the group. You’ll see him up bright and early, polishing his shotgun. The others will be having coffee, playing basketball with the kids, or whatever. He’ll complain about how we never get started hunting on time, but by the third day, everybody will be sitting on the bus waiting for him.”
      He and his son Dan do the guiding, Barbara does the cooking and cleaning, and the kids - whoever’s around - do the bird processing. And we do have some part-time help as well.
      “If I were 30 years younger,” Dave speculates, “I might try franchising the idea, but I wouldn’t want to lose my identity, like with a Holiday Inn or a Perkins.”
      The old and the new
      Dave is just beginning to learn how to use the computer in his large office at the Red Barn. Even though he classifies himself among the “basically computer illiterate,” he does read quite a bit, and he believes that the Y2K problem “is going to screw things up royally…. Come January 3, everything is going to stop moving.”
      “The Conservation District computers were down for four days, and they were helpless,” he adds.
      “I had a hair-raising experience the other day just trying to open a checking account. It took an hour. I remember when it took about 30 seconds. And that was when I wrote real slow - now my name’s just a squiggle.
      “People can’t survive like they did in the old days,” he says, noting that people in the country will be able to butcher a few animals and get by. “Next year we’ll have water yet, and we can go out on the lakes and cut ice.”
      “You can’t even sell an old hen,” he says, thinking of butchering, and remembering a story from his childhood.
      Dave has a special love for homemade chicken-noodle soup, because of its part in several childhood stories. After he retired, Dave’s father used to pick up a load of old hens from a neighbor in the fall, and they’d butcher a couple every week to eat. There would always be a couple laying eggs, so they could make noodles. They always had fresh vegetables from a big garden. “It would go in a kettle - and it would get better every day,” Dave says.
      The old hens kept getting cheaper and cheaper, until one day the neighbor told him he could have them for free. When Dave’s dad offered to come over and pick up the chickens, the neighbor teased him as he often did: “The hell you will. Nobody’s going to come onto my place and steal chickens!”
      Part of the teasing had to do with the fact that the neighbor knew it was getting increasingly difficult for Konechne’s father to handle the crates. The neighbor delivered the chickens to the Konechnes that day, as he had done many times before.
      No, Dave’s no computer whiz, and the Red Barn doesn’t yet take credit cards, but, he says “Our customers seem to like the laid-back atmosphere.”
      And the old-fashioned neighborly service.
      A little history
      Konechne says there are a few other converted barns in the region - Tom Travis has one south of there, and near Geddes there is one copied from the Konechne model. There are similar types of businesses - like Thunderstik south of Chamberlain, and Pheasant Crest northeast of Kimball.
      Most of the material that went into the making of the Red Barn was taken from elsewhere in the barn, or is historically significant to the area. Some Dave accumulated, being a self-proclaimed packrat. Items like the hay track and trolley are original to the barn. The paneling on the first floor was the barn’s exterior siding. Many bed frames were built from the lumber of the horse stalls. A counter top was formerly a door from St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain. In the top floors, there is lumber from a local school house and an old Kimball hotel. One door to a downstairs bathroom is special to Dave because it came from Frank Smith’s place: Frank was an old-timer, a lifelong neighbor who lived into his 90s. The large picture window that looks out over the countryside from the south end of the third floor is of mysterious origin. The piece of glass ended up behind the bowling alley in Kimball after they built the new addition, and Jack told Dave he could haul it all away. Dave didn’t realize until he’d installed the window that “Knothe Tin Shop” was etched into the glass, and he’s not been able to find out anything about the window’s history so far.
      The Red Barn has 30 beds, and seating for at least 50. They have served at least 300 people at summer barbecues. Don’t be fooled by the rustic setting and décor - there are plenty of TVs, VCRs, electric heat, air conditioning, etc.
      They do a little bit of direct mail, but word-of-mouth is by far their prevalent method of advertising. They refuse to up their rates during the tourist season. “We have the same rates year-round,” Dave says.
      Dave is a fourth-generation farmer who was born and raised within four miles of the Red Barn. Barbara comes from Andover, south of Aberdeen.
      Dave and Barbara have five children still in school - two girls in high school and three boys K-8. They have an older son living and working on the farm. They have four children out of state, and the rest are in college or employed in the state. They also have five grandchildren.
      He and his son Dan do the guiding, Barbara does the cooking and cleaning, and the kids - whoever’s around - do the bird processing. And they do have some part-time help as well.
      Konechne and his family guide mostly pheasant, but they hunt some waterfowl as well. “There has been water here since 1982. We have several sloughs, even though the deepest one may be only about eight feet deep. We have one slough that’s probably 160 acres.”
      “The water goes in cycles,” Konechne explains. “Now were on the wet cycle - we’ll have water for three or four years. So when the Y2K disaster hits, we’ll be able to cut ice.”
     

Dakota Southern Railroad, day in the life of a short-line
By Bruce Hope 99

     Last Sunday, the Huff brothers had their first day off since August.
      There was enough rain Friday that they made the decision to take a little break. (Rain softens the ground enough to cause rail shifting and increase chances for derailment.) “We’re pretty much caught up,” Dick Huff said.
      As of Sunday, Dakota Southern Railway (DSR) still had 13 cars to pick up in Reliance, and 22 cars in Presho, as well as some grain to be delivered from Chamberlain. Rich Bauer was leaving that morning with 26 cars, adding four loads of soybeans in White Lake and seven loads of corn in Mt. Vernon. But, caught up for the most part.
      The main product shipped by the Huffs is wheat, which goes east to domestic flour mills, or to the Gulf Coast where it is shipped to Asia. (South Dakota isn’t big into durhum wheat for pasta products, but North Dakota is.) Farmers Union Co-op Elevator manager Todd Yeaton says that the one 26-car train hauls away about 86,000 bushels of wheat. This amounts to around 1,700 acres of wheat. Some farmers have as many as 3,000 acres, but the average in this area is about 1,000 acres.
      The wheat harvest is primarily July and August. The beans are done, for all practical purposes. The corn is just getting a good start. “Overall, the harvest has been good to excellent,” Alex says, “and there has been so much additional storage built that we haven’t been stressed, transportation-wise.”
      “Now you drive west on the interstate, and reach a high point near Lyman, and you notice all these shiny steel bins reflecting back to you. In Mitchell this year, there were 10 times as many built as last year,” he adds.
      Many rules of the rail were determined in the 1870s, according to Alex. They have some rail on their line that was laid as early as 1906. “It is too light to safely run more than about 10 mph (the GM engines weigh 180 tons, develop 1,750 horse-power, carry 2,400 gallons of fuel, and are capable of about 65 mph),” Alex explains. DSR track is typically 65 pounds per lineal yard, while the track used by modern coal trains, for example, is about 132-36 pounds a lineal yard. Even though Dakota Southern trains are held to a maximum of 10 mph, to correspond with the weight (size) and condition of the track, they still offer a valuable service to local farmers and other businesses.
      “Country roads are not the interstate either, but they still serve a purpose,” Alex says.
      “The railroad opens up additional markets,” Dick says, “keeping smaller elevators competitive with larger elevators.”
      Alex Huff explains why Dakota Southern doesn’t move all of the corn there is to be moved in this part of the country. Since DSR is on the western boundary of the corn belt, he says there is a truck market for westbound corn – for feeding cattle, for instance. Another reason is that a lot gets consumed locally.
      Yeaton says that in this part of the country, on-farm storage amounts to only one-half to two-thirds of the harvest, while some areas elsewhere can hold the whole harvest. The yields this year, according to Yeaton, are 55 bushels/acre for wheat, and 45 for beans. Corn will be about 110 bushels an acre on average, he predicts.
      The short line bottom line
      “A railroad gains efficiency as it increases volume,” Alex says. “We are something of an anomaly, considering our low volume and number of miles moved."
      Major rails don’t bother to compete in hauls less than around 200 miles, Alex explains, whereas Dakota Southern has to compete for hauls that average about 70 miles.
      As with any small business, survival involves mastery of a complex set of data. And maybe some luck. “Like any small business, we wear a lot of hats ... put in a lot of hours,” Alex says. “It helps to be single.”
      The Huffs face a significant hurdle in the fact that they have no alternative connections. They only connect with one railroad, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, at one location, Mitchell. “We’re captive to one railroad, and they’re not going to give competitive rates,” Alex says.
      One thing that’s being discussed in Washington, D.C., according to Alex, is something called “open access.” Just as deregulation allows different telephone companies over the same wire, the same thing could apply to rail traffic. Even though this would give elevators in this area a choice of more than one rail line, they support the concept.
      Qualified operators could run it like a toll road. Dick explains that he recently attended a meeting at which the chairwoman of the federal Surface Transportation Board said she expects legislation to be introduced next Congress. She didn’t have any forecast concerning passage, but the Huffs will remain hopeful. Dick notes that she predicted grain would be piled on the ground this year, and that the problem would be lack of market, not transportation shortage. That’s the way it’s been, according to Dick: a slow year because of slashed Asian demand.
      “There are only two railroads in the west,” Dick explains, “and we’re about to have only two in the east, so there is the fear of monopoly, or at least oligopoly. This is why you’re beginning to hear rumblings in Washington, D.C.”
      “What’s really hurt us this year,” Dick says, “is the ‘Asian Contagion.’ This was the main destination for much of the grain. When the economies collapsed, it had a serious effect on the grain prices in this country.”
      As of Sunday, the Huffs had rail cars en route to Washington, New Jersey, Texas, Alabama and New York. The typical round trip is about 28 days, Dick says. He adds that they’ve had a train sitting in Kansas since Oct. 2. “So much business is being funneled into Beaumont, Kan., we’re sitting there full of wheat. They are backlogged loading ships. We’re not too happy about that.”
      Grain grading
      The grain is graded (“probed”) on the basis of protein content, foreign material moisture, and a very complex value called “falling numbers.” The federal lab that tests the grains is based in Aberdeen with a satellite office in Marion. Bigger places, like Mitchell, that load 110 cars in 15 hours, need on-site inspectors.
      Alex notes that grain is sold on “destination grade” if it is trucked, but is graded at the point of origin when hauled by train. (This is to prevent an unscrupulous trucker, or company, from picking up a different load on the way to market.) Of course, the grain sample at point of origin can’t be taken by the elevator. The graders are private entities licensed by the federal government and given a market territory, to prevent competing grading companies from sweetening up the grade to get business. All this is to be sure the elevator manager has confidence of knowing what he’s selling, according to Alex.
      “Truckers will not want to sit for 24-48 hours, so they’re pretty much stuck with the buyers’ grade,” Alex says, and the two say they have heard stories about elevator operators who are pretty certain they sent a better grade of grain than what was paid for, but they agree that, as Dick puts it, “you’re only going to stick an elevator about once.”
      Movin’ out west
      Alex got the idea of railroad work while playing cards with a guy in Vietnam who worked for a short line railroad (like Dakota Southern) in Michigan. Alex went to work there after the war. Then he worked in New Orleans. Then he got involved in the formation and management of a short line in Michigan. They would eventually sell out their interest there to buy the Dakota Southern.
      Alex and Dick Huff moved to South Dakota under unusual circumstances. In 1980, the state was “caught in a firestorm,” and had to buy a lot of track (by imposing a one-time sales tax hike). Alex says this is an anomaly. The first state in modern times to do so was Vermont in the 60s, but few states have bought up the amount of track they did in South Dakota. It started in 1976, with seven bankrupt railroads in the Northeast. (Just recently, Oklahoma, for example, just bought 150 miles of Burlington Northern track.)
      Prior to 1980, a railroad had to provide six years of employment to anyone working on the railroad, or at a job affected by the railroad. This was seen as the starting point for negotiations between buyers and sellers, and was the result of unions faced with trying to maintain jobs in a declining industry. Who would continue to provide job security for employees? Another prohibitive factor, according to the Huffs, was the fact that the process required when abandoning a stretch of track was made very elaborate and adversarial.
      Having no union to contend with makes Dakota Southern more flexible. A union would not allow employees to cross craft lines – an engineer who ran locomotives could not work on maintaining that engine, for example – and this is something DS employees continually do.
      The Huffs were from Illinois originally, and Alex Huff was originally hired by L. G. Everist in the early 80s to set up a private rail system to haul rock from Dell Rapids to Sioux City, after the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific had gone bankrupt in 1977. All rail service south of Aberdeen was discontinued in South Dakota in 1980. (A resurgence in short line railroads was beginning to take place nationwide at that time.) They operated the Platte line from 1985-89, and even acquired another line in the northeastern part of the state during that period.
      Meanwhile, Burlington Northern decided in 1986 that they didn’t want to run on such a light track as the line from Mitchell to Chamberlain. Members of the rail authority had observed the operation of the Platte line, “and they figured we knew what we were into,” Alex says. So, they were invited to take over a third line in 1987 (Dick was an absentee partner until coming on board full-time in 1989). “Suddenly we had a very full plate,” Alex marvels. They would later exercise their options to terminate agreements with the other two lines, since their real focus had always been the Chamberlain line.
      The Rail Authority is an oversight body, with representatives from counties and other entities. The state leases the track to the Rail Authority for a dollar a year, and they lease it to the railroads for a dollar a year. But maintenance of the track must come out of the freight revenues.
      Since Dakota Southern has some track as old as 1906, one might wonder if the stuff ever wears out. In fact, it depends on the location and traffic. “Life expectancy of track on sharp curves, with a train every 30 minutes, may only be 18 months,” Dick says. “On the other hand, there is track near Plankinton that was rolled in 1898. It’s strictly how much use.” When the Huffs need to replace track, it is due to a flaw, a break here and there. They have not found it to ever really wear out. The best mile of their track is the bridge over the river, which they think is probably the longest bridge on the Missouri River.
      Short line sidelines
      The biggest concern a railroad has, according to the Huffs, is a surge in export demand that would bring old stored grain into the market during a strong harvest. “It’s like the typical spring flood scenario,” Dick says, “where it rains in the mountains on top of a lot of melting snow.” This happened around 1992, when Dakota Southern was leasing locomotives from Burlington Northern to handle the extra flow. “The only reason they leased them to us, was that they wanted the grain,” Alex says.
      Dakota Southern hauls mostly grain, but also hauls a little rock. They hauled the rebar for I-90 west of Oacoma to the top of the hill. They also hauled the rock for the new Oacoma streets.
      They also have a unique agreement with Universal Packaging, who recently located just northwest of Mitchell, one half mile from the end of Dakota Southern’s rail line. Universal Packaging, based in New Hampshire and recently acquired by Adolf Coors, will become the largest building in Mitchell with its current expansion plan.
      Schwann’s Ice Cream cartons are made there. Red Baron Pizza cartons, Lunchables, and 9 Lives Catfood. This latter carton is one of many produced in several languages, including Russian. Alex thinks out loud, “Interesting ... there are still people in Russia who can afford imported American cat food.”
      DS keeps their switch engine at Universal Packaging to turn cars around. Huge rolls (six feet in diameter) of heavy glossy paper come into the yard in boxcars from Alabama, Arkansas, etc., and sometimes the boxcars have to be turned on a turntable (one of only two left in the state) so that the doors through which the rolls were loaded are facing in the right direction to be unloaded at the carton factory. Dakota Southern has a part-time conductor in Mitchell who operates the switch engine, or one of them drives there if he is unavailable.
      For years, the Huffs have provided instructional sessions and train rides for school groups at the end of the school year in the spring. They have an agreement with Mark Kothenbeutel of Omaha, who owns the passenger cars used for rides across the river during the Lewis and Clark Festival in Chamberlain-Oacoma last year. In exchange for storing the cars, the Huffs have access to their use for school children.
      They own five road locomotives, two switch engines and 23 rock cars. They lease another 165 100-ton cars, and employ 11 people year-round. They hauled about 5 billion bushels of grain – their major commodity - last year. They operate on 187 miles of track, from Kadoka to Mitchell.
      Parked near that yard are a couple of “highrails” – those familiar highway/railway vehicles. Across the street is large orange truck the Huffs have determined to be “the ugliest truck in Chamberlain, and probably the state.” But its winch will lift the front end of a locomotive, and that makes it the most powerful winch in town.
      And nearby is the oldest working piece of equipment in the yard, a “Jordan spreader” – a 1937 snow plow/ditcher.
      Their yard, like their office quarters, are what some might considered cluttered. But they know where everything is. “One thing L.G. Everist taught us,” Alex says, “is to keep a large bone yard.”
      So what do you suppose these two eligible bachelors did on their first day off since August? Caught up on paperwork, of course.
     
     
      The end of the line for DSR? (1999 article)
     
      Alex Huff changed hats to speak to the LFCDC on the subject of Dakota Southern Railway’s discontinuation of grain hauling services between Kadoka and Mitchell.
      Although the shortline railroad, owned by Huff and his brother Dick, has not moved any grain since January, the official date chosen for discontinuation was April 1.
      “The reasons are largely external,” Huff explained, citing a Wall Street Journal article about the changes and monopolies in the railroad industry. “The industry has basically coalesced into two large railroads in the West.”
      The Huffs have been aware of the problem for a long time, and finally decided to quit while they were ahead. The railroad is operating in the black and has no long-term debt. “This is probably as low cost an operation as you will find in our line of work,” Huff said, “but the way the system is currently rigged, there’s no economic incentive for shippers.”
      The Huffs have made the Governor aware of the problem, but have made no headway so far. They have tried to meet with the Secretary of the Department of Transportation, Ron Wheeler, but he has been too busy.
      The problem is that Burlington Northern and Santa Fe monopolizes the rail service from Mitchell to Sioux City. Huff believes that the rails should be opened up to competition - like electricity, like utilities - making them like toll highways. The shipper would pay a fee to the owner of the rail line, but would have access to alternative carriers.
      Especially considering that the track in South Dakota is mostly owned by the state, it doesn’t make sense not to open the rail lines to competition.
      “Burlington Northern lacks the confidence in their own pricing decisions to allow them to be tested in the marketplace,” Huff says.
      “Monopoly brings economic inefficiency, resistance, and a lack of innovation,” he added.
      “The farmers end up paying, because of lower prices, higher taxes (because the roads are damaged by trucks),” he says.
      “And there is damage to the local infrastructure,” he concludes. “The farmer doing the trucking with his own semi is not likely to shop locally.”
     
      An example of the way the lack of competition hurts everybody, Alex explains, is during the busy periods when Burlington Northern runs short of locomotives. When there is a string of waiting rail cars, fully loaded with grain, “they have a choice to move our cars, or their own. Which do you think they choose?”
     
      The biggest problem is getting the grain moved out of South Dakota, Huff says. Sometimes it will sit for as much as two weeks in Mitchell. Once it gets to Sioux City, there is access to alternative shippers, so the grain moves much more efficiently.
      The Huffs would like to see competition in the state, and on their own line as well. “We don’t claim to have all the answers,” he said. “But it should be the same as electricity - the owner of the wire should be compensated adequately, but the line should be open,” Huff said, citing Isabel Benham, the most highly-respected, long-term advocate of this philosophy. “She is a retired stock analyst who specializes in railroads,” Huff explained. “Her papers are now in the St. Louis Mercantile Library.”
      “Her ideas look good from the viewpoint of a company’s stockholders,” Huff says, “but may not look as good to an engineer making $100,000 a year with one of the major railroads.”
      Huff estimates that opening of the rail lines would reverse the shipping patterns. Instead of 75 percent trucking, the grains would be shipped by rail 75 percent of the time. In a state that is highly concerned with the impact of overloaded trucks on the roads, Huff suggests that this should seem an appealing alternative.
      As to the impact on the trucking industry, Huff says it’s a blip on the radar screen. He noted, however, that the news of their discontinuation of grain hauling immediately spread across the region on CB radios.
     
      According to Chamberlain Elevator manager Todd Yeaton, all the elevators along the line will be seriously impacted. “I shipped out about 200 cars last year. Kennebec shipped at least as much - Draper, Vivian, Murdo, Reliance, Presho, White Lake, Mount Vernon - take that total times four, and that’s the number of new grain semis we’ll have on the highways now. An illegally-loaded truck does damage equal to that of 9,000 cars.
      “For the last couple of weeks, it’s been advantageous to ship by rail, but the way the rate structures have been running, DSR is about a six-month railroad … through no fault of theirs.”
      The elevators are all offering their support of DSR, and have offered to go to Pierre to help plead the case with the Governor. Rail shipping often makes a shipping difference of 35-40 percent, and in business with slim margins, that’s all the difference in the world.
      “We’re screwed,” Yeaton said, “for lack of a better term.”
      “All the large grain companies want to eliminate the middle men,” Yeaton says, “which is us. They want the farmers to store the grain and ship it themselves.”
      The elevators will have to truck grain now, and are looking long and hard at the numbers to see how many trucks they need to have running. Yeaton has two trucks running, and is looking at the feasibility of buying three or four more. “We lost our preferred mode of transportation,” Yeaton said, explaining that he’d much rather load 26 train cars in a week than 100 trucks a month. “You can get a train, 86,000 bushels, out in a 12-hour day, but to get out 86,000 by truck takes a month.”
      “This raises costs and time investment considerably,” Yeaton explains, “and will double our storage problems.”
      The elevators prefer train transport for another reason, as well. Yeaton found this out the hard way when a truck shipment of grain going to Minneapolis wasn’t the same grade by the time it got there. So he didn’t get what he should have for the shipment. Grain hauled by rail, on the other hand, is sold based on origin grade.
     
      When they began Dakota Southern 14 years ago, the State told the Huffs they wouldn’t last six months, but they have survived. They do not like the idea of increased regulation, but they would like to see a level playing field.
      Alex believes that the railroad industry nationally may have been short-sighted in all of this, judging from the mounting public resentment.
      “They might in response to negative public opinion decide to cut us some slack, but they have no legal obligation to do so.”
      The best solution, according to Huff, is to be granted “overhead rights.” “We could used the track for a fee,” he says, “but couldn’t stop to pick up grain along the way.”
      The solution will probably take federal legislation, Huff says.
     
      Dakota Southern will continue its lease of the track between Kadoka and Mitchell, and will continue maintaining that track (which includes weed control), but they will be looking at other possibilities for the future.
      “This may be a little overstated,” Huff says, “but we have a railroad and no track (or more precisely, no economic reason to operate).”
      For the time being, Dakota Southern will be able to trim its operation enough to subsist on revenues from the piece of track near Mitchell that is used by Universal Packaging Company, now Mitchell’s largest building and expanding. Universal, who makes the cartons for Schwann’s Ice Cream, various pizzas, etc., must traverse the small section of track and often must rotate their cars on the Huff’s turntable (one of the last two in South Dakota). Because the paper comes to Universal in rolls that are six-feet thick, they must be unloaded from the same side they were loaded into the cars. So the car comes with a designation from the shipper - “Open This Side Only.”
      “It’s amazing how high-tech it is,” Alex says. “The machine comes from Europe, and paper goes through it at a rate of 700 feet a minute.”
     
      DSR will haul in two more trainloads of rock for the Redi-Mix Plant in Chamberlain to fulfill contract obligations, but from now on Donny Steckelberg will have to truck in rock. “This will mean higher-priced concrete,” Huff says.
      Steckelberg, who had hoped to attend the eventful LFCDC meeting Tuesday morning, says, “It’s going to drive up prices considerably. The freight on my rock has been very reasonable. I’m only going to recoup a part of that cost by raising prices.”
      “I’ve looked at alternatives, and nothing comes close,” Steckelberg says.
      “Unless they can get something worked out with the Sioux City connection,” he adds, “we’ll be putting a lot of weight back on the interstate highway.”
      “And if they shut down completely, it may be difficult to find someone to take it over,” Steckelberg said. “Dick and Alex are unique in their interest in such a short line railroad.”
     
     
     
     

Derby Cafe, The: Chamberlain's greatest cafe
By Bruce Hope 99

     In the short list of Chamberlain's most acclaimed attractions of all time, the Derby Cafe has to be near the top. Pastry magnate Duncan Hines himself said that Sophie Derby made the best pies in the United States.
      Any current resident of this area who is old enough to remember will attest to the validity of this typical note of appreciation that came from an Ohio traveler: "Not until we visited your fine cafe ... did we realize that the ordinary American dessert, pie, could be so lifted from the common ranks to one of distinction."
      Sophie became famous for her donuts, chow mein, and cakes, as well. "She turned up her nose at a loaf cake," says former waitress Edna Holstein. "She made three-layer cakes."
      But the Derby's Cafe (or Derby Cafe, depending on the source and date) was also well-known for its steaks, sodas, fried buttered lobster, crab, oysters (in stew, raw or fried), sardines (American or imported), and olive nut (and other) salad(s).
      When the Derbys put in a large walk-in cooler, a butcher at the Henry Hass store by the name of Amos Rutan worked at night to teach the cooks how to cut meat. After that, the Derbys aged their own carcasses, cut their own beef, made their own hamburger, and served it all on sizzling platters.
      The most expensive item on the menu in the '30s was a large T-bone for 90 cents (at the end of the menu, it says, "You must visit the beautiful new State Theater.")
      Food magnate Duncan Hines loved to come out hunting in the Chamberlain area, as did top brass from Field and Stream magazine, Ford Times, and AAA (the American Automotive Association), who all recommended the restaurant in their publications.
      An accomplished hunter, and always the promoter, Orie Derby blanketed the countryside with road signs advertising the cafe. He bought an old hearse, and fixed it up to haul hunters out to what was Dwight Glaus? (now Alvin Reuer's) place, south of Chamberlain, for goose and pheasant hunting. (Andy Chopskie, husband of Sophie?s sister Ora, was the driver.)
      Orie's daughter Donna (Derby) Hieb of Chamberlain affirms that he was a born promoter. In those early days, she says, he would write promotional letters to groups on behalf of the Chamberlain Sportsman's Club, which didn't really exist at the time.
     
      Among the extant Derby Cafe memorabilia are three signs - one in the possession of Bill Ausdemore of Chamberlain, one in the possession of Jeanette Beemer of Pierre, and one Dana Kenobbie has restored for the Silver Dollar Bar. Nell Labidee has several place settings of the heavy stoneware used in the Derby.
      Walter Labidee helped new owner Mel Beemer clean out the Derby Cafe, and Beemer rewarded him for the favor with the dinnerware, knowing how much outdoor entertaining he did. Walter, a Navy veteran, died in 1983.
     
      Orie and Sophie's career began when Orie and his father Will (whose wife Hulda came from Sweden when she was seven) bought Mac's Cafe (where the VFW is now located) in 1921. That same year, Orin and Sophie were married, and changed the name to Derby's Cafe. Later, they moved across the street, to what was Nelson Electric and Delaney Plumbing, and is now Jack's Barber Shop and Don's Shoe Repair. In 1931, they moved to the Metcalf building, which became M&R Enterprises, and is now the south section of the Silver Dollar Bar. Will Derby died in 1934. Hulda lived until 1961.
      Several people who worked for Orie and Sophie at the Derby's tell versions of a story about Orie. According to Josephine Blackwell, Orie would walk through the restaurant in the morning carrying a couple of geese, getting the hunters fired up about the day's hunting prospects. Marjorie Miller, who was a waitress there for over seven years, thought that he probably brought the same two geese through for several days. Donna herself says he may have walked in the front door with some geese, exited out the back door, and come through again to give the impression that he was bringing in more geese to clean. Jeanette Beemer, who with her husband Mel owned the Derby for over 10 years after the Derbys sold out, says she heard stories about Orie's flamboyant dragging of recent kill through the length of the cafe, as well.
      When the Derby moved to its last location in the Metcalf building, it was just south of the railroad depot and Chamberlain Wholesale. Old Highway 16 was the only highway through Chamberlain in those days, and it went through town just a couple doors to the south of the Derby, past what is now Casey's Drug and Gregg Drug on Beebe Avenue (it crossed the river where the old piers still jut out of the water north of the bridge).
      Orie put up road signs all over Highway 16 east and west of Chamberlain. Al Mueller, who built up the phenomenally-successful Al's Oasis across the river in Oacoma, told Donna Hieb one day, "I learned to advertise from your dad."
      It was easy to tell when the Derby was busy on a particular summer day. People would be lined up all the way around the corner, at the current location of Gregg Drug (Neal Fuller Drug in those days), and Orie could always be seen passing out menus to those waiting to get into the cafe. "So they wouldn't get away," says Josephine Blackwell, who baby-sat Donna Derby, and spent many an hour in the Derby. Baby-sitting Donna, Josephine would be responsible for supplying the child one meal, and then she and Donna would have one meal at the Derby, something Josephine always looked forward to. Donna also spent a lot of time with "Grandma Derby," as she called Hulda.
      (Note: Mark Berg is currently restoring the house at 114 S. Merrill where Donna lived with her family until she was married to Ervin Hieb in 1950.)
      The Derby stayed open 24 hours a day, in order to feed the railroad men as they came through. Across from the Derby's original VFW location was the Merchant's Hotel. Where McDonald's is now, stood the Taft Hotel. The Mussman Hotel stood at the present site of Thiel's Body Shop.
      These were the only lodging places in those days, except for places like Josephine Blackwell's home. Her father died when she was eight, and her mother turned their large home into a rooming house to accommodate CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) fellows, hunters, and tourists.
      Blackwell remembers babysitting for those who participated in couples bridge club on Sunday nights. The food was so cheap at the Derby, she said, that people just came there during bridge club.
      Many local residents remember the glass counter full of cigars and the tobacco "tins." Others recall tables with Derby hats emblazoned on them. Nearly all remember the food. There was really only one other place to eat downtown in those days, according to Blackwell - "a hamburger joint where burgers were a nickel."
      Donna Hieb says she and her sister Vi (nine years older) "grew up in the cafe, and as soon as we were able, we were working there, busing tables, washing glasses, making malts and sodas, and then working as a waitress or cashier." (Donna?s sister, Violet, now divides her time between Glen Arbor, Mich. and Naples, Fla.)
     
      She also notes that there was a shortage of help because of World War II, when a lot of people moved to the west coast to work in factories. "Yes, it was like a ghost town during the war," Blackwell agrees.
      Blackwell explains that the Derby was very busy during the typhoid epidemic of 1932 because there was no school, no movies, etc. They decided that the typhoid was from the water, Blackwell says, but the Derby filtered their water. "They were very strict about cleanliness," she says. "We always had to have clean shoes and white uniforms. They were very fussy - you could never leave a spoon in a salad."
      "I never heard of anyone getting sick from being at the Derby," Josephine said.
      Donna put in a lot of hours in those summers. Even though the restaurant was very successful, she says her father was strict. "It was a big family affair. Everybody worked. If you wanted to buy a dress, you had to work, for it," she says. And work she did - 54 hours some weeks, getting up and working before going to school at 8.
      "There was never enough help," she said. "You worked whether you wanted to or not."
      "As a kid," Donna recalls, "all my friends wanted to have their birthday parties at the Derby. I always wanted to have mine at the house."
     
      Edna Holstein started as a waitress at the Derby in 1927, raking in $5 a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., with an occasional break from 2 to 5 p.m. Normal tips were 10-15 cents. Edna's sister, the late Hazel Saskoske, also worked there. Edna typed the menus for a time, since no one else could type. She worked for a year and a half at the cafe before going to Iowa for a couple years. Orie sent her a letter, offering her a raise to come back, which she did. A year later, however, she landed a job at St. Joseph's Indian School as the one girl in the office at the time.
      Edna noted that working that 7 to 7 shift, the waitresses' got pretty sore. One of them, however, discovered something at the drugstore that made their feet numb, and made them feel better so they could go back to work.
      Edna tells a story about a regular customer who would insist on a clean new bottle of ketchup, and who, she finally realized, was pouring a little on his burger, and then slipping the bottle inside his coat. She told Orie, who instructed her to let him know when the man came in, and to watch to see if he did it again. Then Orie waited at the cash register where the man complained that he had rung up more than was on his bill.
      "That's to cover the ketchup bottle you put in your pocket," Orie said.
      "The man never took ketchup again," Edna says.
      Edna remembers a man from New York and his family who reacted almost violently to being served corn on the cob, something they'd never encountered. "What do you think we are in New York, pigs?" he asked loudly, while hustling his family out the door.
     
      The Derby employed more people than any other business in town, according to Marjorie Miller. She worked more than seven years at the Derby, starting out as a bus girl, and eventually training 33 waitresses one summer (she had started as a waitress at Bill Hinders? caf鬠also on Main Street).
      ?Orie and Sophie were good bosses,? she said. ?It was fun working with their daughter Violet. When daughter Donna was in school I occasionally helped her with school work. Ma Derby always came in all dressed up with hat and fur cape.?
      "I learned how to serve breakfast," Marjorie says, "when two waitresses walked out on Orie one night. They didn't even finish their customers. Orie threw the book at me, and said 'You're a waitress!'"
      The first order was from a large group of construction workers, Miller says, and she had barely got the first grapefruit cut up when the cook was ringing the bell. "I didn't have any silverware out, no fruit, nothing," she says, "and I went back to the kitchen to ask him what in the world was going on. The idea was that you should have everything done before you call in your order."
      When she started at the Derby, Miller was just out of high school and just a little boy-crazy, she admits. There were a lot of good-looking boys at the CCC camp on American Island in those days, and sometimes she and her friends would stay out late. "Waitresses were a little hard to come by," she says, "and Orie would have to come around in the morning and wake certain girls up.
      Miller notes that the girls would scrub and wax the place once a month, and afterwards Orie would take them to American Island to grill out steaks, or have some other kind of treat.
      She says that her father wanted her to go to beauty school, but that Orie convinced him that she could make more money as a waitress. So she stayed with her job, making 10 cents/hour, 10 hours/day, seven days/week. She never forgot her first tip, from a tourist couple, because it was $2.50, more than two days wages.
      Marjorie often amused herself at work by "trying to figure out people" - Were they married or not? Which one was the husband? (She says this game is harder nowadays, but she still plays it.) She was not always successful at it, she admits, recalling a scene in which she said to a woman, "This is a beautiful diamond you have here from your husband." Later in the conversation, the woman informed her, "This is not a diamond, and this is not my husband."
      She waited on Duncan Hines many times, she said, when he would come out to hunt in the Chamberlain area. "Orie always had me wait on him," she says. "He ordered prime rib, trout dinner, and special salads."
      Sophie learned to drive finally after Orie died. She also became very active in the Eastern Star and the United Church of Christ.
      Sophie's sister Opal was the original baker, but Sophie took over when her sister left Chamberlain during World War II.
      Sophie averaged 30-50 pies a day, seven days a week, for six months a year for about 15 years.
      She never had any recipes: "I do it by the feel," she said. Still, she gave the following general advice to pie makers:
     
      ?Use plenty of butter and shortening, no prepared fillings, fresh frozen fruits and natural fruit juices.
      For the crust, use ice water and work the dough just enough to handle it. Many people maul the dough; that makes it tough.
      For meringue, a real specialty of Sophie's art, she said, ?The main thing is adding the sugar and whipping it enough," although she couldn't tell anyone exactly how to make it. Just a few minutes in a hot oven will brown the meringue right.
      ?In addition, she says, the crust should be dry and the filling ?good and cold? when they are put together, so the crust won't soak.?
      Although she was known for a variety of exquisite and subtle pastries, Sophie's own favorite pie was apple.
      Sophie was the fourth of a dozen children raised on a ranch near Pukwana.
      Gov. George Mickelson and Mayor Vern Schoenfelder in separate actions proclaimed July 22, 1988, Sophie Derby Day in Chamberlain, noting that her pies and pastries created a "boost for the area hunting and tourism" in the area for years to come.
      The City of Chamberlain celebrated Derby Day by reenacting a day at the Derby (using the American Legion building and Main Street), complete with homemade pie and donuts.
     
      After Orie died, Oris Dott bought the Derby in 1954. He sold out to Mel and Jeanette Beemer in 1955. Sophie resumed making pies when the Beemers took over the Derby. (Jeanette now lives in Pierre as does their son Doug and his family.)
     
      Mel Beemer and Nick Kallas (had a restaurant in Lake Andes, where Mel had a clothing store) bought the Derby in 1955, according to Jeanette Beemer, and it had been in business in various locations for 47 years by then (a AAA restaurant for much of that time). Mel bought Nick out in 1959, and the Beemers had the restaurant until Mel went to work for the South Dakota Department of Education in 1966 (he actually commuted to Pierre for two years before they gave up the restaurant).
      The Beemers' head waitress Betty Kesselring and her husband Howard tried their hand, leasing it for a year but that didn't work out. So the Beemers sold out in 1968. It was the right thing to do at the time, according to Jeanette. "About that time, there were rumblings about Al's Oasis being built. Charly's was open, and so was the Rainbow. And the Silver Leaf, I think it was, across from the Rainbow."
      "We were worn out," Jeanette says, "and the street had been made into a one-way ... the wrong way for us."
      "For years, it had been the watering hole between Rapid City and Mitchell, and they were talking about Al's Oasis."
      Beemer, who is now 82, did payroll during the busy months in those days. She says the peak was 31 employees, one of whom was their son Doug (longtime optometrist in Pierre), who started as a bus boy not long before (going into eighth grader) the Beemers moved (they bought the Cable house, and the Blackwells lived between them and Sophie Derby).
     
      The Derbys? daughter Donna (Hieb) still lives in Chamberlain. Things were different in those days, according to Hieb. Like most Chamberlain residents, she loved going swimming on American Island (flooded when the Pick-Sloan dam system was built). "That was a neat place," she reminisces. "There was a swimming pool, golf course, race track, and trap shooting range The folks would take the help over for picnics, and we'd build a big bonfire and roast weanies."
      Donna figures her dad always wanted a son, sportsman that he was. He bought her a gun for trap shooting and hunting, but she never shot a pheasant. Josephine (Boney) Blackwell, Donna's baby-sitter knows this to be the case. "Orie thought he was going to have a boy, so he bought this huge buggy," she says, "and I had to wheel Donna all over in that thing."
      Josephine baby-sat Donna from 7th grade until she graduated from high school. She says she didn't make much money, but came out of it with a lasting friendship. "Donna was so good," she said. "My mother and brother really liked Donna." Josephine's father died when she was eight.
      You could go to a movie for 10 cents, Donna says. On Saturday, you got two shows for 10 cents. Her favorites were the Shirley Temple movies. "I had scrapbooks of Shirley Temple," she muses.
      "Things were different then," she adds, on a more serious note. "You could go anywhere and not have to worry."
      Chamberlain didn't have school buses in those days, she recalls. "No matter how deep the snow, they never called off school. We did a lot of walking in those days."
      Since there were no road graders in those days, the snow became packed on the roads and the sledding was great. They would sled all the way down Stearns Ave. and "Toboggan Hill" (the steep hill that comes by River City Glass). "We were sleigh-riding in the streets," she says. "Traffic wasn't like it is now."
     
      Ervin and Donna Hieb just built a home north of the water tower on the South Hill in Chamberlain, moving from the farm where they lived for 40 years. Across their backyard, which Ervin is currently landscaping, is the large grove of trees behind Chamberlain High School. One reason they liked the spot was because it is thick with birds, and the Hiebs love bird watching from their new deck, with and without binoculars.
      Ervin came from a background of farming and raising cattle. He started working for his brother Joe at the Amoco station in 1969, and found he enjoyed working with the public. They leased Hieb's Amoco from 1969 until they took it over in 1981. Standard Oil was not in the habit of selling interstate locations, but they did in this case. Their son Curt brought his Kawasaki shop into the business as well (he is now a Honda franchise). Curt has also taken over Bob Augspurger?s golf cart business. Hiebs buy bulk through nephew David, the Amoco jobber in Reliance. Joe's son Lowell now runs the Reliance station.
      Donna did all the bookwork for many years, but when computers came along, she decided it was time to step aside. She still fills in at the station, and oversees things when needed.
      They bought the Main Street Standard in 1985, but closed it in 1994. They dug up the tanks that year to comply with EPA regulations, and then decided to close.
      They still have the farm they rented from 1950 to 1959, and then bought in 1965 - five miles north of the place Ervin?s grandfather homesteaded, living for a time in a sod house. The farm is not far from where Ervin?s parents, John and Margaret, raised their family.
     
     

Geneva Krois, Chamberlain island owner
By Bruce Hope 99

     Among the famous residents of Chamberlain who have seen a lot of changes come and go this century is Geneva Krois.
      Few people have owned their own islands, but that number is especially small in the state of South Dakota. In fact, there may have been only one family.
      Eli Fort and his wife homesteaded a few miles north of Chamberlain, and came to own what was eventually called Fort Island in the Missouri River at Chamberlain. Eli was famous for his extensive fishing - commercial and otherwise - up and down the river. Legend has it that his fish traps and nets in the river south of American Island would catch large amounts of sand, and eventually created a sandbar that grew into an island.
      Eli was also famous in the community for his love of the outdoors, and for planting trees all over the area. He was responsible for the landscaping at the Sanitarium, for instance. Eli gathered trees in his travels up and down the river. He sold catfish and other fish, Geneva says. She doesn't think they had walleye back then.
     
      Eli and Fannie had Fort's Cafe in downtown Chamberlain. Fannie would stay up all night peeling potatoes, preparing a big meal at the cafe, Geneva says, which would cost a quarter. There was a horse and buggy that would pick up travelers at the train depot and take them to the Taft Hotel or Fort's Cafe.
      Eli and Fannie were the paternal grandparents of Chamberlain resident Geneva Krois.
      Eli Fort passed the island on to his son Clyde Fort. Clyde and Hazel both had birthdays near the end of August (hers on the 28th, his on the 30th), so they had a party every year and invited the whole town out to the island. They had a boxcar (used as housing when the dams were being built) that they kept about a thousand chickens in.
      "I had to pump water to feed the chickens," Geneva says, "and than had to sweep out the boxcar."
     
      There was no electricity when they first moved into the house on the island, but eventually Clyde struck a deal with Al Hinker, a local appliance dealer. Hinker said that if Clyde would buy a refrigerator from him, he would put the lights down to the house."
      One of the stangest sequences of events on Fort Island involved a diamond ring belonging to Geneva's cousin Verna Gilbert. It seems that she was planting potatoes with the family when she lost her diamond ring.
      Months later, someone found the ring while peeling potatoes. A potato had grown to envelop the ring.
      "I told her she should have put that in Ripley's Believe it or Not," Geneva says.
      Geneva herself used to take a little red wagon around selling cantalope, watermelon, corn, tomatoes, etc., grown on Fort Island.
      While they owned the island, Crannys raised dairy cattle on the land, Geneva says. "They delivered milk to everyone in town," she says. "In exchange, I got to ride their horse!"
     
      Geneva sees all the pictures of American Island nowadays, which was also flooded out of existence, and wishes she'd taken pictures of her family island.
      "American Island was our Lovers' Lane," she says. "We would go there to swim and pick berries." She also remembers the M&M Tent Shows that came every year to American Island, and the boat rides across the river with their friend Captain Earl Aieres.
     
      Clyde didn't want to sell the island when the government got ready to flood it in the 50s, but like so many landowners along the river, he had no choice.
      The house that the Forts lived in on the summer island is now a garage just west of Jack Mueller's house on ___ Street in Chamberlain.
     
      She remembers a story about her father Clyde as a boy. Clyde had wanted some money to go to the circus, and Eli had refused him, so Clyde took some fish out of one of Eli's traps and sold it for circus money.
      Clyde started out as a helper in the ice cream factory of the Chamberlain Water Company when river ice was still being used to freeze the ice cream. The ice cream came in one flavor only - vanilla - and cost 65 cents a gallon (they shipped as far east as Plankinton and as far west as Kadoka. They got letters from all over the U.S., saying how good their ice cream was, Geneva says.
      Eventually, Clyde rose to the position of manager, and eventually bought a good number of shares in the company.
      Geneva later found out about a little trick her dad pulled on some of the local kids that worked at the Water Company. He told then they could eat all the ice cream they wanted ("I grew up on ice cream and pop," Geneva says, "and ate a few fudgesicles, too") but to leave the ice cream bars alone. Chuck Anderson, who now drives school bus locally, later told the story in the newspaper of how Clyde dipped pieces of wood in chocolate and package them for the freezer. You can imagine how surprised the kids were.
     
      Geneva went to school with Violet Derby, of the famous Derby Cafe family.
      She remembers when the bridge was built in 1925. They dedicated the bridge, and threw flowers off the bridge. The big parade attracted people from all the surrounding communities, with many Indian people in full regalia, and who set up tents in the North Park area.
      She remembers the dirty 30s, with all the grasshoppers, bugs and dust. She says that one time driving to Mitchell the car stalled from the dust plugging up the air intake.
     
      Geneva's husband Joe was stationed in Reno during the war. They went to Long Beach every Sunday, and Geneva says they were always seeing famous people in California. She has a picture of a very young Mickey Rooney sitting in the grass during a break from a movie shoot there. They attended a live recording of the George Burns radio show. "Gracie was so small and pretty," Geneva says. They saw Duke Ellington in a theater. They saw Cab Calloway in Los Angeles.
      Joe would later become well-known for his work as a mechanic at the current location of the Bottle Shop in Chamberlain. Geneva says Jack Mueller recently asked her for a picture of him in front of the station. "He was always helping everyone out," Geneva says. "I never thought of taking a picture of him in front of that station."
      Joe passed away March 1, 1993, just before their 50th wedding anniversary.
     
      Geneva took a fall on the basement stairs a few months back, breaking a leg and crushing her ankle. She may have to wear the ankle brace indefinitely, she says.
      She is also just healing up from a burst blood vessel behind her eye. The laser treatments have been successful, as her injury is no longer visible.
      It happened while she was eating with a friend. "A claw came over my eye," she says. "It never did hurt, but it scares you when you lose sight in your good eye."
      "The worst of it is that I can't jump in my car when I want to," she says, keenly aware of her new dependence on others to get around.
      She got a call recently from one of the boys from the University of Kentucky that boarded with the Forts while the dam was being built in the late 50s and early 60s. Geneva used to cook Sunday dinner for the group of seven.
     
      The family stories are being continued by Joe and Geneva's four daughters: Susan Swanson (with husband Gary, north of Pukwana); Diane Hieb (with husband Dave at Chamberlain); Debbie Krois (Robbie's Apartments in Chamberlain); and Linda Kercher (with husband Kenny in Gillette, Wyo.).
      Geneva retired from Sunset Valley Nursing home in 1989 after 23 years.
      Throughout her life, Geneva has been active in many groups, including the Christian Women's Club and the Know Your Neighbor Club. She still delivers food to shut-ins and others, and their groups have made several contributions to the cause of battered women.
      She was a longtime member of a local musical group - the Tea Bags - that toured the state regularly. Their theme song was "When the Saints go Marching In." They played at places like Walt and Mary's Cafe and the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls. They were pictured on the cover of a state bankers magazine.
      "I played horn, and was the Alley Cat," she says. She remembers embarassing a priest by sitting suggestively on his lap. Among the other members of the group were: Geneva Gunderson, Shirley Geddes, Florence Raisch, Josephine Raisch, Tillie Clemmons, June Alquire, and Marie Woster ("She could really play piano," Geneva says).
      Joe's brother, Conrad Krois, wanted to build Joe and Geneva a house in Grant's Pass, Ore., but Geneva never had any desire to leave the place she was born.
     

Gumbo Lily: Flower of Night
By Bruce Hope 99

     Perry Foltz, who works at the Senior Citizens Center in Chamberlain, found that no one in the Center had heard of a certain plant he was describing. He was surprised that the older citizens hadn’t heard of this flower that blooms from late afternoon, through the night, and closes up by morning.
      “It is the only flower I know that grows in these barren gumbo hillsides around here,” Foltz says. “I had never heard of it until last year, and I’ve lived around here for about 24 years.”
      According to the South Dakota State University Bulletin 566 “Plants of the South Dakota Grasslands,” the ten-petaled blazingstar, eveningstar, or chalklily, is a biennial, or short-lived perennial, native forb 1-4 feet tall. Stems are stout and buff colored. The plant has 10 petal-like structures and keeps the hours of barflies and graveyard-shifters, opening its petals as sunset nears and closing the following morning.
      The flowers are creamy white and appear from mid to late summer. The leaves are rough and deeply incised, but they are not as prickly as they look, according to Foltz.
      The ten-petaled blazingstar is distributed throughout an area bounded by Manitoba, Iowa, Texas, Mexico, Nevada, Idaho and Alberta. In South Dakota, it is found on dry hillsides, preferring shale banks, or banks whose soil is rocky or sandy, or has been disturbed, as along roadsides. Some people in this part of the country call it the gumbo lily.
     

Hutterite Colony, Spring Valley
By Bruce Hope 1998

     Outsiders have joined traditional Hutterite colonies, like Spring Valley, but it’s a rare occurrence. In fact, Joe Waldner can only remember it happening a couple of times in Canadian communities.
      And it’s not unheard of for members to leave the community. But this too is rare. And, contrary to popular belief, they are welcomed back with open arms if they choose to re-enter the Hutterite world.
      Joe Waldner, secretary-treasurer of the Spring Valley Colony Ranch east of Gann Valley, says that only three have left their colony, and not come back, since they started in 1964. One of these went to vo-tech school to become an electrician (he could have learned the same things at the colony, but could not have been certified to work outside the colony). Another came back to visit recently.
      Another four have left and come back after a couple years away from the colony.
      But nearly all of the young men and women raised in Hutterite way of life are happy to be there. They all labor from a young age, and they are eventually guided into the areas of the operation where they have shown the most aptitude and interest. “You kind of get a feel for what a kid is interested in, and is good at,” Waldner says.
      The Hutterites have achieved very high levels of self-sufficiency, but Waldner says they could use a few pieces of equipment in the machine shed. “And we’d like to make our own automobiles,” he jokes.
      They build all kinds of things, most everything they need, with the exception of vehicles and grain bins. They built the conveyor and auger system that moves their grain around, and which will connect with their new feed mill when it’s completed next fall. They designed and are in the process of building the new feed mill, welding more than 20 steel bins (to dispense soybean meal, limestone, dikal, etc. for different feeding mixes for all the enterprises) before hoisting them into place with their 100-foot crane. The east end of the mill will have a 600-ton overhead capacity with 23 cones, or feed spouts, underneath. The all-computerized feed mill will be connected to the rest of the grain-handling system, including two 80,000-bushel bins, three 20,000-bushel bins, a 40, a 30, and a couple of 12s.
      Colony members built a hydraulic scaffold truck from an old school bus. They stripped the bus down to its chassis, motor, and driver’s seat (it looks like a Mad Max vehicle) and built the large hydraulic lift on the bed behind the driver’s seat. They are currently using it for work on their new school house.
      Perhaps the most unique things being created at Spring Valley are books. Eli Stahl (uncle of Dave Stahl, the gardener and German teacher at Platte Colony) makes books, largely by hand but with the aid of some fine machinery. As with most of their businesses, the Hutterites have grown their book bindery - and their book binding skills - at a steady pace.
      “I am learning, little by little,” Eli says.”Today, they have excellent equipment, and Eli will bind between 80 and 90 books in the next two months, working a few hours a day. As one might expect, the Hutterites build their books mostly of leather, and bind them to last. “It is very slow work,” Eli says.
      The 80-some books he is working on for the colony are German sermons, in the original longhand. Evergreen Colony in Manitoba reproduces and prints the German sermons, which have been handed down for centuries.
      For all the home-made machinery, the colonies still depend on the outside world for the manufacturing of automobiled and state-of-the-art kitchen, refrigeration, and laundry equipment, among other things. Their new laundromat, for example, consists of computerized washers and dryers, each mounted on four independent springs, and default programmed for 19 different possible settings (water level and temperature, and other options). Each household has a large cart, with motorcycle-size tires, for the transport of laundry. An motion-sensing electric eye used to open the door for them, but they had to do away with that system. It seems that every dog, bird, butterfly, fieldmouse, falling leaf, or bit of flying debris in the area was causing the doors to open. Nowadays you have to push a button.
     
      Spring Valley Hutterian Brethren do celebrate Christmas, but not in the flashy, superficial way that most Americans do. They don’t have Christmas trees, and the sparse decoration that does take place grows out of individual family traditions, and not colony traditions.
      “We exchange gifts, especially for the children, but this is not the purpose of Christmas,” Waldner says.
      Observation of the holiday - getting the whole Christmas story covered - is a three-day process, Waldner explains. Amidst a series of special services, all but the necessary work, such as feeding livestock, is suspended from Dec. 25-27. Some colony members travel to other colonies to spend that time with relatives.
      But that can happen any weekend, according to Waldner. “It kind of depends on the workload, whether we are harvesting, or whatever. The people are good in that way - if they were gone last weekend, they’ll probably stay home for a few weeks.”
      The Hutterites celebrate only three holidays - Pentecost, Easter, and Christmas. Thanksgiving is a time colony members spend working together, pitching in and making beef and pork sausage.
      Sausage-making begins with the grinding of the meat, mixing in of the spices, and then stuffing into a casing. The colony owns three sausage stuffing machines, reflecting the evolution of their technology. The first is an old cast-iron crank grinder. Sam Stahl says that you really notice the hand stuffer when you’re making jerky. Jerky becomes very pasty, and it’s hard work to crank the stuffer. The next-newest stuffer is an aluminum cylinder run by normal water pressure. The casings are placed on a spigot to receive the extruded sausage. They just got the newest machine recently. It is stainless steel and completely hydraulic.
      After the meat is packed in the casings, it is hung in the smoker where it is cooked for about four hours. Then the sausages are boiled in water at 160 degrees for about three hours, and then it’s ready to eat. Spring Valley butchers beef and pork for their own use only. They would have to hire a federal inspector if they were to market commercially out of state.
      Year of the turkey
      As is the case with other colonies, their customers come to the colony to buy a variety of turkey products - regular turkeys, smoked turkey, salami, cutlets, pickled gizzards, etc. Their operation is nearly identical to the one at Grass Ranch, with the same computer-controlled environment and feeding equipment, but there are a few notable exceptions. At Spring Valley the ceilings in the turkey barns are insulated, and the large mechanical curtains on the windows, which help control temperature and ventilation, are insulated (four inches thick). This gives them better temperature control than their brethren to the south, according to turkey manager Phillip Stahl.
      “The only difference is, ours tastes better,” Waldner says, taking a playful jab at his cousin Simon Waldner, the meat manager at Grass Ranch. The two colonies started their turkey operations at the same time. Spring Valley currently sells around 165,000 turkeys a year, raising them from day-old chicks to 18-weeks, and shipping out around 16,000 every five weeks.
      Spring Valley is more into cattle than the other colonies in the area, raising 450 beef cows and doing some calving. They ship 9,500 farrow-to-finish hogs a year. They are also venturing into the raising of broiler chickens for resale - “We are just getting into it,” Waldner says. “It will depend on demand … we’re just feeling it out.”
      As far as the low hog prices are concerned, Waldner is matter-of-fact. He thinks the Asian crisis did more to affect the market than anything else. “We had some good hog years - they’ll probably be back.”
      “Right now, there’s nothing better on the farm than turkeys,” Waldner says. “I think it pays to be diversified.”
      “With Amendment E,” Waldner says, “you’ll probably not see too much expansion.” The colony is incorporated like everybody else, he notes. “We are a family farm, of course, and we feed our turkeys like we want to, but we still sell to out-of-state corporations. South Dakota will probably not see much building going on for agriculture, livestock feeding operations. How can you stop the agriculture corporations, when the Wal-Marts and McDonald’s are incorporated? We’re going to have some rich lawyers about, that’s all.”
      Life on the farm
      Farming in both Buffalo (a couple miles west) and Jerauld Counties, Spring Valley Ranch has been no-till for 11 years. They raise winter wheat, barley, sunflowers, corn and hay. They averaged 128 bushels of corn on 1,500 acres this year. A lot of their wheat, sunflowers and barley had hail damage. They always insure, but not always the same amount. “It had been hailing around us for the last couple of years, so we took it out this year, and we’re lucky we did,” Waldner says.
      They mix about 12,000 tons of feed a year, just for their own use. They have their own grain handling system, of course, and are in the process of putting up a new feed mill which will tie. “We can make more money putting feed through livestock than selling the grain on the market,” he says.
      The Hutterite network
      In Waldner’s office is a modern switchboard capable of transferring calls to any building on the colony. Up until eight years ago, there was only one telephone on the place. When checking the spelling of names, Waldner consults a small booklet which is the Hutterite Telephone Directory, containing every colony in the world, including those in Canada (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba), Montana and Washington.
      There are basically three groups of Hutterites in North America - the Schmiedeleuts, the Leherleuts and the Dariusleuts. The word leut - pronounced like “light” - stands for “people,” and schmied means “blacksmith,” leher means “schoolteacher,” and Darius is simply the name of the leader of that particular sect. All 53 South Dakota colonies are descended from that group whose leader was a blacksmith, as are the 90 colonies in Manitoba.
      In Montana, there are 29 Leherleut colonies and 13 Dariusleut; in Washington, six Dariusleut; in North Dakota, six Schmiedeleut; and in Minnesota, five Schmiedeleut. Colonies average around 110 people, according to George Stahl, Sr., while the Spring Valley Colony consists of about 145 members.
      In Manitoba, there are 90 Schmiedeleut colonies; in Alberta, there are 87 Darius and 60 Leherleut; in Saskatchewan, 29 Darius and 27 Leherleut; and in British Columbia, there is one Dariusleut colony.
      The Schmiedeleuts (all of South Dakota colonies) and other groups of Hutterites get together with the Canadian Hutterites every so often, based on need.
      Waldner has two daughters who are pen pals with two Dariusleut girls in Alberta. The biggest differences among the groups have to do with cultural traditions, such as how they dress. Some Canadians wear black hats with the tops pushed out, for example, Waldner says. The differences are not radical. “The religions are the same,” says George
      There is another group of Hutterites called the Bruderhof communities, located throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and England. They are manufacturing communities, and they are comprised of people from all over the world - most are not born there. “They are a whole different culture really,” Waldner says. “They claim to have the same basics, but anytime you’re not born into something, you’re different.”
      According to George Stahl, Sr., the Bruderhof used to be combined with the traditional Hutterites. “We are kind of separated now … but not formally.”
      Certain people in these groups speak German as the rest of the Hutterites do, but most of them speak English, and their church services are all in English. “They say they follow the same religious tradition,” Waldner says, noting that they have family suppers on Sunday, whereas the main body of Hutterites gathers as a single body for suppers.
      Hutterite customs
      and modernizations
      Just as the Hutterite churches are completely barren of any iconography, or any other decorative distraction, their singing is without musical instruments. They strongly discourage the use of musical instruments. “There will be some small ones, but they are not for public use,” Waldner says. In spite of the dearth of instruments, the colonists do a lot of singing. Waldner pulled out his Voice-It, pushed a button on the thin, pocket-sized, digital recorder and his daughters could be heard singing a hymn in excellent pitch and seamless harmony.
      Joe and his wife Kathryn have six children: Jolene, Joel, Joanna, Julie, Thomas, and Leona. Joel is currently involved in feeding, while the girls do the cooking, cleaning, sewing, garden work, canning, laundry, etc.
      As is the case with all the colonies, a male member will stay with the colony he was born at (or split off to), while a female member may move for marriage purposes.
     
      There are about 30 children in school presently; they will attend through the eighth grade and then assume a suitable role in the economy of the colony. Spring Valley is building a new schoolhouse. They will maintain the building, while the Wessington Springs School District will lease it from them for 12 years. This arrangement is the choice of the school district, Waldner explains, and it has been done with three colonies that he knows of.
      Spring Valley has two preachers: George Stahl, Sr., and George Stahl, Jr. For many years, George, Sr., has maintained the trees and shrubbery on the farm, all of which was planted when the colony moved there in the 60s. “There were no trees here,” Waldner says. George, Sr. gets around on a small Ford tractor - a 1939 9N, which he dearly loves. George doesn’t do as much outdoor work anymore, as he was crippled by a stroke a couple of years ago. He still teaches lower grades in German School, and divides preaching duties with his son.
     
      Spring Valley split off from the Platte Colony in the early 60s. They started building in 1963 and moved in 1964.
      On the wall of Joe Waldner’s office at Spring Valley Colony are two signs, like you might find on the wall of any business office: “I can only please one person a day, and today ain’t your day,” and “To our past due credit customers - When you die, please let us be your pallbearers. We carried you so long we’d like to finish the job.”
      Outside the dining hall, is a giant, home-made outdoor grill on which they recently barbecued T-bones and buffalo wings, since the weather has been so nice. (Joe also has a great recipe for marinating turkey cutlets for the grill.) Outdoor work is proceeding on the new school and the new feed mill. Children are playing in the fields, in the old machinery, and out at the pond where the muskrats have built mounds.
      As a visitor leaves the colony, he or she is greeted by a large sign that says “Auf wiedersehen,” which means “see you again.”
     

Hutterites of Platte Colony
By Bruce Hope 1997

     The Platte Colony is built along Snake Creek, just west of Academy, and about a mile and a half north of the Missouri River, as the crow flies.
      The Hutterites would not normally be working on Sunday, but recent rains have delayed an abundant harvest, and there is much to be done while the weather holds. The colony members attend daily worship services, and go twice on Sunday, which is normally a day of rest and worship, but last Sunday there was work to be done.
      Three combines are running night and day over the no-till fields of corn and soybeans (with a couple hundred acres of wheat for straw). They haven’t used a disc or a plow for five years. “The earthworms are coming back,” says Dave Stahl, the colony’s gardener and German teacher. “It requires fewer people, less machinery. We needed it here; we were losing so much topsoil (it’s worse on the other side of the river). I think it’s here to stay.” The reasons for good crops the last couple years, according to Stahl, include; “good moisture ... we’re always working on the seeds ... and no-till.”
      Meanwhile, the last pickings of garden vegetables have been gathered, with exceptions like carrots and parsnips that wait for the first good frost.
      Besides working the farmland, the Hutterite community runs a milk cow herd of 80 cows, maintains a 1,000-sow, farrow-to-finish hog unit, and raises a few thousand chickens for which they are regionally famous. It is less known that they are in the egg business, because they don’t sell eggs on the street, but many area residents come to the colony to buy eggs directly.
      The Egg Man
      Platte Colony buys hens at around 20 weeks old, and the hens start laying at 21 weeks old. At 40-50 weeks, the hens are taken off feed for four days (they still get water) because they quit laying when they get too fat, according to the operation manager Mike Waldner. This technique, called “molting,” (also called recycling) is a temporary diet which gets the the hens laying again, and laying better eggs at that.
      It takes an hour and a half for Waldner and his co-worker Daniel Stahl to gather all the eggs, if there are no problems. The 25,000 hens average six and a half eggs for every seven days, for a total of 19,500 eggs, or 55 cases, a day. The same space used to generate only 10,000 eggs, but a recent upgrade in the ventilation system has allowed the increase in the number of chickens, or enabled the increase in production. They now ship out a semi-load about every 10 days to the factory in Iowa.
      The fully automated feed system regularly augers in a supply of corn meal and vitamin D (there is little sunlight in the chicken warehouse) through a narrow trough along the outside of the long rows of cages. They are fed seven times a day, and agitated six times a day in between the feeding periods. “Stimulation,” as it is called, is part of the daily feeding routine. The automatic food-augering system comes on for a dry run once a day, during which time it merely stirs the food for a half a minute. The sound of the auger turning causes the birds to eat.
      Currently, the hens get 16 hours of light and feed - the lights go out at 7 p.m. and come back on at 2 a.m. - “they have to rest too,” Waldner explains. According to Joey Waldner, who is in charge of grinding feed, it takes 22 pounds of feed per 100 chickens per day. Waldner is also the beekeeper of the colony.
      The chickens are six to a cubicle, and the floors of the cubicles are plastic grates which guide eggs onto a continuous conveyor belt running alongside the cages. The chicken’s excrement drops through the cage floor onto another conveyor belt running beneath the cages toward the far end of the building where it is dumped onto another conveyor which lifts it up into trucks or wagons. Then it is piled elsewhere on the property where it dries for a year or so, until it loses some of its richness and is then safe to apply to farm or garden soil.
      Once the eggs are set in their moulded plastic trays and stacked on pallets, they are wrapped around with clear plastic. Going around the pallet with that large roll of high-test Saran Wrap made Waldner dizzy at first, but now, he believes, the brisk exercise does him good.
      The eggs seldom incur much damage in shipping, but 35-40 eggs, or maybe a half a percent, are lost before they get to the packing stage. Waldner says there is virtually no loss once the eggs are stacked in their plastic trays on pallets and wrapped in self-adhesive plastic. It takes 35 cases to fill a pallet, and 756 cases to make a semi-load. The pallets, which are moved with a forklift, weigh 2,100 pounds each.
      This particular crop of chickens is DeKalb (other well-known breeds are Babcock, Bovine, Schaefer). This was an unusual purchase, having to do with availability and pricing. “Of the 50 years we have been here,” Waldner says, “we have probably had Hyline chickens 99 percent of the time.”
      The Platte Colony eggs do not go to grocery stores, but Mike Waldner has been to the factory in Sioux Center, Iowa, where the eggs go onto an assembly line for processing. First, they are cracked open and divested of their contents as a razor slices an opening in the side of the egg. At the first station, the egg is tipped open just far enough to dump the white out. A little farther down the assembly line, the egg is opened all the way and the yolks are emptied out. The accumulated mass of egg white often runs directly into tankers, and is hauled off to be used by bakers, Schwann’s Ice Cream, etc., while the yolks are dehydrated into powder form. Both of these products are used in a variety of food products throughout the country. Waldner explains that 95 percent of the people who sit alongside and cull out the faulty eggs are Mexican women.
      Of course, the egg shells are ground up and used for fertilizer. “It takes a few wet years for the calcium to be used,” he says. “It is a gradual process - the nutrients are used a little at a time.”
      “The egg is truly an incredible edible thing,” Waldner says, “but did you know that there are 2,300 inedible products that are made from eggs (shampoos, lotions, glues, etc.) and more are being discovered every day?”
      “The only thing made pure is an egg - it is the only thing not touched by human hands. A barn might be as dirty as you can imagine, and still the egg would be pure inside. It is sealed until used.”
      “The egg market is good right now,” Waldner adds.
      The best times for egg farmers are Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, when people do the most baking.
      Chicken dancing
      In another part of the colony are raised the chickens that the colony is famous for. The colony members eat quite a few of the chickens themselves. People in this part of the country are somewhat used to seeing members of the colonies in towns selling the chickens and vegetables. But most of their selling takes place on the premises, because once people have tasted the chickens, they refuse to buy anywhere else.
      The Platte Colony is is the process of building a new slaughterhouse for their famous fryers. They currently sell around 3,000 to people locally each year.
      They get the chicks a day out of the shell. Like the turkey chicks at Grass Ranch, these chicks begin their lives in a controlled environment of 100 degrees, and the temperature is lowered each day as they mature. These chickens are bred for meat, not eggs. The chickens are raised on top quality feed, chelated vitamins - no preservatives, no synthetics - just pure food. “They get no drugs, from day-1,” Mike Waldner says. “If you look at the chickens, you know they’re happy in that coop.” They are slaughtered or sold at seven weeks old (they prefer that people buy them live and butcher the chickens themselves).
      This is the last bunch for the season, and they’ll be somebody’s supper in about two weeks. When the new rendering facility is built, they will butcher all year round. At the end of a flock’s stay at the colony, the automatic feeder/waterer system is raised up on its pulleys, and the entire building is cleaned. They scoop out the bedding (wood chips) with a loader, and clean all of the feeders by hand.
      Healthy vegetables
      Mike Waldner is father-in-law to Dave Stahl, garden manager and German/religion teacher. Stahl farms about a 25-acre vegetable garden and currently teaches about 25 children, ages 5-15, the Bible in German (Luther’s version). Stahl says he sells the vegetables to people all over the state. One man buys vegetables to sell on the streets in Rapid City, for example.
      Stahl usually plants around 1,000 tomato plants (Sunstart, Sunrise or SunGem). It is mid-October, and there are many leftover tomatoes that will go to waste. The entire garden produced in abundance this season: heads of cabbage and cauliflower big as basketballs; juicy watermelons, muskmelons, strawberries, horseradish, asparagus, carrots, parsnips and potatoes; several kinds of squash, including butternut, acorn and Holland (he sells a lot of Holland squash and potatoes in the Rosebud/Mission area).
      And yes, they have an acre of pumpkins (about 1,000 a year).
      Stahl is using a plastic piece to keep moisture in and weeds down, but he also uses a unique plastic bladder of water around the plant underground so he can plant them at the same time as the cabbages, before the last couple of frosts have passed. This is helping him toward his goal of harvesting tomatoes by the Fourth of July.
      Although Stahl still has to spray for bugs, he says, “I’m working my way toward organic gardening. If you have healthy plants, you shouldn’t have any big problems.”
      He notes that you can kill bugs with high sugar, for example - they just overeat and die.
      They also grow an orchard, but Stahl says it hasn’t been too good the last couple of years because of the cedar rust which has blighted the trees.
      The colony’s education system is fundamentally the same as that of any other young person in South Dakota, as the colony is part of the Platte School District, but it has the added benefit of home-schooling. As the colony’s German and religion teacher, as well as its gardener, Stahl is the only colony member who is a teacher (same as at Grass Ranch and other colonies).
      Stahl likes to teach the students the German alphabet before they start English, but he is also now working on English for preschoolers, to make it easier on the English teachers who come into the system and have to face all these young people who only speak a little bit of English. Besides beginnning German before they start to formally learn English, the Hutterite young people get refresher courses on Saturdays in the summer (primarily hymns and Bible verses) to provide a little maintenance for their German.
      In reality, Dave and Anna say, there are three languages spoken at the colony: 1) High German; 2) low German -or, more accurately, a combination of several languages, including Pennsylvania Dutch and a little Russian; and 3) English.
      Dave and his wife Anna have three children - David, 9, Michelle, 7, and Michaelene, 12. He has two brothers at Platte - Johnny Stahl is the farm boss, and Dale Stahl is the main boss. Their father and three brothers are at Grass Ranch. When the two colonies split up, fates were decided by drawing lots. His father maintains the vehicles there, and the his brothers work in the welding shop, the turkey operation and the hog operation, respectively. Dave has a sister at Bon Homme Colony, near Tabor, and one at Greenwood, near Delmont.
      “I wouldn’t make it if I couldn’t ask questions,” Stahl says. “That’s my schooling - other people. We travel to the other colonies, and I ask.”
      “The farm life is a great place to be. It’s a good way to raise a family,” Stahl says, “but it’s a tough way to make a living for many people.”
      Cows and such
      Mike Waldner, Jr., works in the cow barn, where they currently milk 70 purebred Holstein cows. Milking barns have changed considerably over the years. The cows rest on mattresses made of shredded rubber tires and wheatstraw bedding, and 19 36-inch fans keep them cool.
      “It takes two hours to milk them, if they’re good,” Waldner says, “but if they’re ornery, it can take a lot longer.” The cows are fed twice a day, a mixture of grain and corn sileage. The waste product is scraped off the floor twice a day as well.
      The cows produce an average of 65 pounds of milk per day, but they are very touchy, according to Waldner. Say, for example, that he and his boss Isaac Waldner wanted to go to town or somewhere for the day. A new person handling the milking might be enough to cause a considerable reduction in production. “It can drop down in one day, and then it’s hard to get it back up.”
      Right now, milk prices are OK - $16.85/100 pounds. A load of about 8,600 pounds is picked up every other day by the Dairy Farmers of America, who distribute it all over the country.
      They also keep a crop of calves to be their future milk cows. They have been using A.I. (artificial insemination) for about 10 years. “If you want a good herd, you’ve got to do it,” Waldner, Jr. says.
      Besides the well-appointed mechanical shop, the residents of the Platte Colony have a sophisticated machine shop, where they can shear, bend or punch iron and other metals. All of the sparsely-furnished homes feature nearly all home-made furniture. `“We try to do whatever we can to cut expenses ... and to give people work,” Stahl says. “If you don’t work, you get into mischief.”
     
     

Iditarod 2002
By Greg Latza Mar 02

     Correspondences from Greg Latza, South Dakota photographer commissioned by Wells Fargo to document the participation of South Dakotan Vern Halter in the Iditarod dogsled race.
     
      Hello all,
     
      Yes, I'm still alive up here in Alaska, I just need to catch a few zzzz's so I sound sane when I write to you. I'll write in the morning, which will end up being about 11 a.m. CST by the time you receive anything. Vern drew 33rd place for his starting position tonight.
     
      More later!
     
      Greg
     
      Anchorage, Alaska: February 28, 2002
     
      I couldn't remember the descent being quite so bumpy the first time we flew into Anchorage; as I looked out the window into the night I could see the city lights swaying back and forth in the distance and the mountaintops whizzing by below us in the moonlight. The wings of the plane were flapping as turbulence made a few people gasp...but it made me smile. I like this type of stuff. It's kind of like dogsledding with all the changes in speed and stability.
     
      Five and a half hours after leaving Minneapolis, we landed in Anchorage. We gained time with the three-hour time difference, but my body still knew it was midnight in South Dakota, and I was beat. We finally got to bed about three hours later.
     
      When I came down for breakfast in the hotel, Vern was chatting noisily with the other people in our group...as usual, I could hear him before I could see him. Everyone was drilling him about the condition of his dogs, what his sixteenth Iditarod would be like, what the dogs' names were. I imagined that he has answered all these questions dozens of times in the past few weeks, but he still talked with eagerness. I think Vern could talk about his dogs all day long and not get tired of it.
     
      Today was a relatively uneventful day for the race's 64 mushers; there was a morning meeting where each musher drew a sealed envelope that indicated his/her starting position (teams leave the starting line every two minutes, with the difference in time rewarded back to each team later in the race). They wouldn't find out the number until the Mushers' Banquet later that night. Various sponsors spoke in praise to the mushers and their teams, and a few vendors explained new gear to be used during the race (for instance, one company provided strong laser pointers that would be carried by each sled in case of emergency...he showed the mushers how to correctly aim it toward a rescue helicopter if the team had to be extracted from the trail at night). Then the meeting was closed to everyone but the mushers. The next several hours were spent listening to race rules, penalties and all manner of advice.
     
      It was time to go sightseeing. Our group of eight shared two rental mini-vans, and we took off toward the south and Portage glacier. We drove along the shores of Cook Inlet, where you can see directly south toward the Pacific Ocean. In fact, if you drew a straight line south out of Cook Inlet, you would not hit land until halfway around the world...the continent of Antarctica. Pretty massive scale for a bunch of landlocked South Dakotans.
     
      We saw and photographed a pair of bald eagles, several magpies and a small herd of mountain goats clinging to the cliffs above us. I'm not including any of those here since my digital camera can't zoom in very well...I'll save those for later when I get my "real" film back. We stopped to eat at a mountaintop ski resort; the annual snowfall there was about 700 inches, or just under 60 feet. The glacier turned out to be a disappointment; we couldn't see it under a massive blanket of snow.
     
      By the time we got back to Anchorage, it was time for the Mushers' Banquet. The Wells Fargo team sat at one of the front tables, and the crowd of 4,000 covered the entire floor of Sullivan Arena (about the size of the Sioux Falls Arena). After some various rituals and pageantry, the mushers were called up to the podium in order of the number they had drawn in the morning meeting...no one knew each musher's place in the race until their name was called.
      When the 33rd spot came around, Vern's name was called. It was much like the scene that takes place after a NASCAR race...sponsors are thanked first, then the team's dog handlers and finally family members. Many of the mushers were rookies, and had no sponsors at all...in a race that supposedly takes at least $30,000 to field a team, it was amazing to see the labor of love some of these young mushers had expended in order to fulfill their dream to race.
     
      When Vern got back to the table, he fielded another round of questions from fans and well-wishers, and he seemed to be a little more excited. He didn't feel strongly either way about his position, but rather concentrated on talking about all the preparation he's gone through in the past several weeks.
     
      I couldn't imagine what it felt like for a musher to be in the middle of 4,000 race fans one night, and in the middle of nowhere a few nights later...on the way to Nome with no roads, highways and little civilization. Even though he was still sitting at a banquet table, his journey had begun.
     
     
      Watching dogs pull a sled is a thing of beauty. When the musher pulls the snow hook (brake) out of the ground and the procession pulls away down the trail, it seems like one fluid motion. At least that's what I tried to remember as I plopped my camera bag and rear end down onto the oval dog pillow situated on the floor of Susan Whiton's sled.
     
      I remember thinking that I should ask Susan (Vern Halter's wife and professional veterinarian, herself a two-time Iditarod musher) why the sled needed such a big pillow, but before I could utter the question, she yanked the snow hook and I immediately became covered with a spray of ice crystals. Remember the movie promo for "Snowdogs" that seemed to run nonstop on TV a few weeks ago depicting a group of
      sled dogs laughing as they prepared to put Cuba Gooding Jr. flat on his back? I thought I could hear snickering.
     
      We flew through the forest bordering the dog farm, plowing through open meadows and making quick work of the trail. I don't think I ever stopped smiling. My posterior left the floor of the sled several times, blowing the whole "graceful fluid motion" term right out of the water. This was some serious running. Susan told me we were
      making top speeds of 14-15 miles per hour, which doesn't seem very fast until you discover that dogs don't slow down for bumps or corners. I thought I could hear that snickering again.
     
      Our whole crew received the sled treatment, one by one, and all of us had big smiles at the conclusion of our rides. Even though I had only traveled a mile or so in the sled, I felt like I understood the dynamic and desire associated with mushing a little better.
     
      For Vern, this was a day of rest. He was busy tying up loose ends all day, paying bills and getting his sled ready for Saturday's ceremonial Iditarod start. He stayed off the dogsled completely, keeping his energy and health intact for the big race. We bugged him for our mandatory interviews and photos, and then joined him and Susan this evening for supper.
     
      Yes, this is a short update. Other than the sled ride and a lot of driving to the dog farm and back, the day was uneventful. From what I've heard, tomorrow will be a 180-degree difference. See you then!
     
      Saturday: 64 dog teams, several thousand spectators and one photographer without earplugs. Will I survive? Tune in tomorrow and find out.
     
      Greg
     
      Anchorage, Alaska: Saturday, March 2, 2002
     
      It's truly hard to describe what I heard today.
     
      Let me try to sum it up with a few statistics. 64 dog teams, each with 16 dogs. That's 1,024 lolling tongues and wagging tails, 2,048 twitching ears and 4,096 dog booties pawing at freshly delivered snow. And oh yeah, they were all barking too.
     
      Today's ceremonial start of the Iditarod was everything I hoped it would be. It's an indescribable spectacle, but I'll do the best I can. There were famous mushers like Susan Butcher, Gary Swingley and Rick Swenson holding court over throngs of admiring race fans. Several thousand spectators cheered wildly for each musher as they departed the finish line. Above all else, Vern Halter stayed his same affable self, signing autographs and mugging for snapshots for anyone who asked. You would think that the pressure of this race, even though today was only for ceremony, would make a musher jittery and even surly. But this day is mostly for the fans, and the mushers show their appreciation any way they can.
     
      We had arrived in downtown Anchorage at daylight and watched with interest at the spectacle; snow had been trucked in overnight and spread over several blocks of the downtown area to make a good surface for the teams. Little pockets of fans milled between mushers, and the usual fan favorites attracted so many people that race officials would have to occasionally clear the street around them. One of the most interesting stories of this race involves Swiss-born musher and three-time Iditarod champion Martin Buser. When Buser steps off his sled in Nome at the conclusion of the race, he will be handed his American citizenship. This morning I witnessed an impromtu ceremony where Buser was presented with an American flag to be carried throughout the trip. Even the Iditarod finds a way to be patriotic! Several teams sported American flags as part of their colors, and one team's dogs were all decked out with kerchiefs made with the American flag design.
     
      As Vern's time to depart drew near, each dog was hooked to the harness and held in place by volunteer handlers. When it came time to move, the team and its handlers trotted down historic Fourth Street and under a huge Iditarod banner spanning the street. The din was deafening. Wife Susan Whiton rode a second sled attached to the rear of Vern's, and Vern's "Iditarider" (a passenger in his sled who contributed a large donation to the Iditarod committee) beamed from the best seat in the house: directly behind twelve bobbing dog rumps.
     
      A two-minute countdown followed. "One minute," said the PA announcer. Then, "30 seconds." And finally a short verbal countdown for maximum effect. "Five, four, three, two, one...and it's Vern Halter on his way to Nome!"
     
      Vern and Susan received a stirring ovation as they passed through a corridor of cheering fans and headed toward the Eagle River checkpoint halfway to Wasilla. Each accessible clearing in the trail held clusters of well-wishers, and even legendary musher and four-time Iditarod champion Susan Butcher relegated herself to bystander status at one clearing. When Vern and Susan caught sight of Butcher, Vern stood on the brake and stopped to give a hug to his longtime friend. It was Butcher and her husband Dave Munson who served as Maid of Honor and Best Man for Vern and Susan when they were married in Nome at the conclusion of the 1986 Iditarod. "I hopped off the sled and we headed for the courthouse," Vern recalled.
     
      The sun was a factor toward the end of Vern's run into Eagle River. "It was a real nice drive for the entire way until the last half hour," he explained. "Then the sun came out and the dogs were getting hot. I thought it was time to quit fooling around and get those dogs back to the truck."
     
      The running order into Eagle River isn't a factor in the overall Iditarod standings since the Sunday restart is the official beginning of the Iditarod. However, Vern did pick up 10 spots to finish in 23rd position. It was a good omen for the ten days to come.
     
      WASILLA, ALASKA: Sunday, March 3, 2002
     
      An entire year of stringent pysical and psychological training was put to the test today as Vern Halter officially began his bid to win the 2002 Iditarod Trail Race.
     
      The day dawned clear and crisp at the starting line just outside of Wasilla. As each of the first 32 teams left the staging area, Vern stood and watched them. Part of this tactic was to time his preparation so he wouldn't get his dogs hooked up too soon, and also to analyze other competitive teams in the race. Finally, when there were only a half dozen teams left before Vern's turn, he decided to harness his dogs. The energy of each dog burst forth as they stood and lunged against their harnesses or jumped in the air to show their eagerness to race.
     
      Vern was a nervous wreck. He endlessly paced through his dog team and seemed to be mulling over last-minute decisions. As the race officials gave the signal and Vern released the sled from its mooring, sixteen dogs put their shoulders forward and nearly burst from their handlers' grip. The power of the team was enormous. Wife Susan was riding a second sled attached to Vern's in order to keep the dogs from setting a breakneck pace, and their team still showed relentless energy.
     
      Leading at the race start were dogs Cello and Vinnie, followed by Mt. Dew and Kroto, Jet and Vinnette, Kooter and Shy, Turbo and Liquorice, Taku and Taz, Flax and Snickers, and finally Lilac and Fiddle. In case you couldn't tell, Vern names dogs from the same litter with a particular theme. For instance, sometimes it's candy (Snickers and Liquorice), sometimes it's musical instruments (Cello and Fiddle) and sometimes even soft drinks (Mt. Dew).
     
      As Vern was introduced at the starting gate, a cheer erupted from the crowd. The countdown began, and each handler released his or her hold on the tow line in the final seconds, leaving the dogs' raw power to propel Vern and Susan past hundreds of race fans. The race was finally on!
     
      The trail wound southwest toward the Knik checkpoint, at times following a highway right-of-way. Spectators gathered in groups to grill food and drink beverages, cheering each musher as they sliced through the snow past these impromtu picnics.
     
      The Wells Fargo team barged into Knik just after noon, stopping only to drop Susan's sled and make various minor adjustments. As the extra weight was removed from Vern's sled, the entourage seemed to be floating above the ground as they increased their speed dramatically.
     
      As of 1:30 a.m. Central Standard time on March 4, 2002, Dee Dee Jonrowe was leading the field after checking in at Skwenta checkpoint, and Vern was keeping steady in 35th place after his stop at Yentna. Early standings don't mean much as the mushers slowly sort out the weak from the strong. Vern's plan was to keep the dogs relaxed and running at low speeds during the warm daytime hours, then to pour on the coal as dark approached, making good time during a lengthy nighttime run.
     
      On a side note, the place we're staying is spectacular. It's near the small town of Talkeetna, and is a huge lodge that overlooks the valley below and Mt. McKinley in the distance. We were treated to clear skies and a spectacular view of the highest peak in North America (20,320 feet) this evening, and tomorrow should provide an even grander view as we hop on a bush plane to fly to the Rainy Pass checkpoint.
     
      Rainy Pass Lodge, ALASKA: Monday, March 4, 2002--by Greg Latza
      Another clear and brisk day greeted Vern on Monday.
     
      Vern spent his longest break so far in this day-old race at the Rainy Pass checkpoint, gliding down onto the snow-packed surface of Puntilla Lake just after noon. He did spend time at the previous checkpoint, Finger Lake, but chose to weather the relatively warm mid-day temperatures at Rainy Pass in order to give his dogs their main resting time while the sun shone. Too much heat during the day is hard on Vern's dogs, and instead his big push out of Rainy Pass will occur primarily after dark on Monday night and into Tuesday morning.
     
      We flew from the village of Talkeetna early Monday in a tiny bush plane; four guys crammed into space meant for two. "You'll know if we stop within a couple of hundred feet after landing whether I forgot to put my skis down or not," joked pilot Kelly. I wasn't really amused.The skis were attached to the wheels of the plane in the same manner as snowshoes, with the bottom edge of each wheel poking through the ski in case of a land-based landing.
     
      The land was immaculate from the air; pristine mountain meadows, swamp land heaped with several feet of snow. As we passed over the highway near Talkeetna, someone asked Kelly where the next highway to the west was. "After this one, there isn't another highway for about 2,000 miles, and it's in Russia." That's a long way.
     
      Vern was all smiles as he found himself in ninth position entering Rainy Pass. He was chattering as always, and even joking at times with spectators and fellow mushers. "Heck of a way to make a living, isn't it?" he asked one of his Wells Fargo handlers. "Don't quit your day job."
     
      Indeed, only mushers would think a chilly 10-degree day unsuitable for running dogs. Optimal temperatures for mushing run far below that mark, and that is why nighttime mushing is such a good idea. Rest the dogs while the sun shines and heat builds, and race at night to avoid exhaustion.
     
      While Vern enjoyed a quick meal of macaroni and cheese and a slab of ham, the dogs ate a selection of fish, chicken and dry dogfood mixed with water. A pair of veterinarians inspected the dogs (they do this with all of the teams) and one found a slight case of distension in Mt. Dew's front left paw. Some quick attention from Vern enabled Mt. Dew to get some much-needed rest for the rest of their stayover. Once the sled and dogs had been cared for, Vern trotted to the Rainy Pass Lodge and found sleeping space within an adjacent cabin designated specifically for mushers.
     
      At this point in the Iditarod, the placings of each musher don't mean much. Teams are establishing their particular pace, and their relative congestion prevents true front-runners from being identified.
     
      Vern's checkpoints thus far: Knik, Susitna, Skwentna, Finger Lake and Rainy Pass. Next checkpoints: Rohn, Nikolai and McGrath. Today was my last real day of action; tomorrow we drive back down to Anchorage for a late evening flight. I apologize that these updates aren't nearly as exciting as the postings from my earlier trip to Alaska; it's just that this race is a lot more organized, and we actually stay in places with running water and beds with sheets. If I discover something interesting tomorrow, I'll write about it...
     
      Finally, on 3/12, Latza writes: "Just a few minutes ago, Vern came in fifth out of the 64-musher field, a great placing for him. His time was 9 days, 7 hours, 47 minutes and 48 seconds, with Martin Buser's winning time (a new record) at 8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes and 2 seconds. Martin's time was the first finish under nine days in the history of the Iditarod.
     
      Vern left the last checkpoint in fourth place, but was passed by fellow musher Jon Little and lost a place in the last few dozen miles. Even though Vern finished the race third in 1999, this year marked his fastest time to Nome in 15 tries."
     
      Look for some images in our Photo Gallery or email the South Dakota Store for more.
     
     

Ken Gregg: Missouri River rancher and artist
By Bruce Hope Nov 01

     Ken Gregg is retired, living on the family place near the Missouri River west of West Bend.
      In the 1940s, Gregg rodeoed with Bill Myers and Casey Tibbs, before the former turned pro and the latter became a rodeo legend.
      Today, Gregg spends much of his time making diamond willow canes (some plain, and some fanciful) at home. He has an electric-powered chair because he can’t sit in one position for long.
      Ken Gregg, who turns 78 on Oct. 7, has had a bad back since he was in his 20s. He first slipped discs pulling a stake out of the ground. He had a boat staked down and went to pull the stake as he walked by. “I was way off balance,” he admits.
      He spent a lot of time in traction in Pierre, and went through many doctors over the years before finally getting an operation four years ago.
      He’s had plenty of other ailments.
      A doctor told him a while back that the bottom half of his heart didn’t work at all. He gave him about five years to live. That was 15 years ago.
      He’s had five by-passes.
      He had an obstruction in his lower intestine.
      He had meningitis, and was unconscious for seven days, he said, noting that they still lose patients to that disease. “There were seven or eight guys at Ellsworth died about 15 years ago,” he said.
      He was given penicillin, which was new at the time, every half hour night and day for two weeks, and ended up spending eight weeks in the hospital.
      “Meningitis works on your brain,” he says. “They thought I’d be blind, or nuts.”
      “You made medical history,” the doctor told him.
      Then he was back in for another two weeks because of nerve problems. His only relief was to walk. “I’m a very nervous person,” he says, “but I’ve tried to hide it all my life.”
      When he left the hospital, he weighed 100 pounds.
      Gregg never took a drink of liquor until he was in his 20s, and drank moderately for years, but was eventually up about a quart of whiskey a day. He has a lot of humorous stories to tell about those days, but he’s not proud of that part of his life.
      “One day I realized I had a choice,” he says now. “I was going to quit or it was going to kill me.”
      Gregg suspected that his liver was on the brink of failure, and his instincts turned out to be correct. Doctor Swanson examined him and told him he’d quit just in time.
      Gregg gave up the cigarettes (which he started in his late 30s) cold turkey as well, carrying a full pack of Camel straights around unopened for a couple of weeks.
      “You’ve just got to do it up here first,” he said, pointing to his head, “and then there’s nothing to quitting.”
     
      Kenneth Gregg had several successful ventures over the years, including the making of diamond willow canes, the raising of aquarium fish for resale, and raising chickens.
      One of Gregg’s grandchildren found out Ken was raising angel fish successfully. He had some 40 aquariums.
      “I know this guy who’s tried to raise them for years,” he said, “and can’t raise one!”
      Gregg was in the angel fish business for about five years until he gave it up two years ago. “It got to be too labor-intensive,” he says.
      The secret of raising beautiful, healthy fish is “lots of work,” he explains. “Keeping tanks clean (he had Culligan install a cleansing tank), putting in methane blue to keep down the bacteria.”
      Gregg came up with some ideas on his own, as well. For example, he cut some pieces of slate from an old chalk board, and put them in the tank. The fish would lay their eggs on the pieces of slate. Any eggs that turned white, he would remove from the tank with a turkey baster.
      Occasionally these days, Gregg will go over and help a neighbor (push up mint with a tractor, for example), but he has to be very careful about how much he works for pay because they cut his Social Security Insurance for a month or two if he makes too much.
     
      Of the many stories Ken can tell, the following is about a most unusual day of ranching on the Missouri River in the early days:
      “The Corps [the US Army Corps of Engineers controls the flow of water through the Pick-Sloan dam system] didn’t give any warning that they were going to back the river up,” Gregg says. He then reveals that he later heard that the Corps had been testing their gates, and had closed them, and they sanded shut. “This is just hearsay,” he adds.
      “We had no forewarning. My uncle (Bernie Gregg) called me in the morning. He said the river’s reaching up into the timber, and I had cattle in there.
      Where he lived, the timber ran lengthwise for about a mile and a half, and there was a ridge down the middle. I figured if I could get to that ridge, I could save some cattle who were stranded all along that timbered ridge.
      “When they raised the water, the snakes, cow manure, and everything came up, and it looked like ground.
      The river was frozen in parts and open in others. It was too thick to boat through and too thin to walk on. Gregg followed the top of a wire fence down to where he knew it joined a board fence which was under four or five feet of water. He knew where the ridge was in relation to that fence and he ran across a patch of ice to get to it.
      “I thought I was in about a foot of water at that point, and I broke through to chest deep - it scared the hell out of me,” he admits.
      Then he crawled back on his belly, and hurried to the house to change into dry clothes and return to the rescue mission.
      Gregg had this old boat that he had put several layers of fiberglass on: “I’d fiber-glassed it so think you couldn’t break it with an axe,” he said. Bernie’s boy Nick, Dicky Dunn, and Bud Hall joined Ken in the boat as they set out on their mission.
      In some places they dragged the boat across the ice. In other places, they chopped ice in front of the boat to get through. (He discovered that the ice was thinner around trees because the trees give off heat.) All the while, they were cutting a trail through ice and water, over knolls, for the stranded cattle to follow. When they got to the island of timber, they circled around it and herded the cattle toward their path.
      Gregg told the men he didn’t want anybody to try to be a hero and get their feet wet (someone who got wet would be a great hindrance to the operation).
      Gregg observed one of the many ways cattle exhibit intelligence. First the cows would circle the island, until they got their own calves. When the cows and their calves would take to the water, the mother would always push the calf to the upstream side and swim against him. The river had a lot more current in those days, Gregg reminds us.
      Anyway, about half way back to shore from the frozen island, at one of the v-shaped bottlenecks beyond a little larger expanse of water than had been previously been experienced, the cattle drive stalled. They couldn’t get them to move.
      Suddenly, Gregg had an idea. They loaded the 200-pound calf of one of the lead cows into the boat and took it ahead to the next dry high point and tied him there. Then they took the boat back around the cattle, and sure enough, that mother came after her calf, and the rest of the cattle followed.
      Gregg’s resourcefulness may have inspired the cattle, but they had skills of their own - Gregg saw nothing like it before or since. There was about a quarter mile through which they had to swim. One cow got turned around in the V they had cut in the ice, and Gregg says it was amazing to see 50 or 60 head of cattle treading water for a full 20 minutes. “You’d see them blow their stomach full of air, and just tread water,” he said, marveling.
      Grabbing the cow by the nose, he got her turned around, almost swamping the boat.
      Bud Hall got a lariat around the cow’s neck and then around a tree and was able to pull her into the V in the ice.
      By then, a whole bunch of relatives had gathered, and Gregg remembers yelling at them to get the hell out of the way of the herd’s travel.
      Through their resourcefulness, combined with the survival stamina of the cattle, they had saved all of the herd.
      A neighbor just down river lost 300 head, that littered the banks of the river until they rotted, Gregg said. He also said that they could have gotten those cattle out too if they’d worked it right.
      One of the main reasons their little mission was a success, Gregg confides, is that it was a small number of people. “Get too many people, and you get too many people making decisions,” he says.
      “I could write a book,” Gregg says.
      Born in 1923 on the Missouri River breaks where he still lives, Gregg grew up in the days of major cattle drives. You didn’t truck cattle around. In 1934, he helped his father move 500 head of cattle from Harrold to Haywarden, Iowa, after lightning had struck the three giant stacks of hay that were to have been the herd’s winter feed. (He points out that when lightning strikes, it goes to the bottom of the stack and can’t be put out.)
      This was the ‘30s, and times were so tough that the bank wouldn’t lend his dad any more money to winter the cattle. Boots Gregg drove the herd to Woonsocket, and called the banker again. This time, he decided he could loan them the money.
      They undertook the three-week drive back in the spring, and the cattle did well that year.
      Another time, “dad got banked and bought 100 head of cows at Little Bend. They thought they were going to have to run to Chamberlain or Fort Thompson, until Boots came up with the idea of using the ferry. George Tagtoe ferried people back and forth in those days. Boots made a deal with him to bring 20 cows at a time.
      In those days, you would loosen the cinch (because the horse takes on air to swim) and grab your horse’s tail to get across the river. Well, most people did. Ken Gregg, who had been born and raised along the river, didn’t know how to swim.
      “That was the first thing I did after I got married,” he said. “I went down to learn how to swim. I thought if someone was drowning, I would want to be able to help.”
      They sometimes drove cattle to stockyards in 20-below-zero weather.
      Complaining about cold coffee on one such drive, Gregg’s cantankerous sense of humor came to the fore as he rode his horse into a café and asked for a cup of coffee. When three women barred the door, he turned around and acted as if riding off, and went around to the kitchen door.
      Amidst the sounds of the screaming women, the clattering pots and pans, Gregg was finally given a cup of coffee and even the Post Toasties he demanded for his horse.
      Another incident further illustrates Gregg’s prankish side. The home place was next to the Lower Brule Reservation, and Gregg had several friends there. One of these, the farm boss, was complaining one day about a bad tooth. Gregg’s response was memorable.
      He told the man that he pulled teeth, and that his forceps were in the pickup. He was just joking and didn’t think the man would go for it, but the pain held sway and he was told to get his forceps. Gregg rustled up a bottle of whiskey for anesthesia.
      Of course, Gregg didn’t own a pair of forceps, and had a heck of a time finding pliers. Finally, he found a pair of rusty, greasy pliers that he wiped off as best he could and then hid in his pocket.
      Talking like a dentist as he got astraddle the man, he covered the man’s eyes with his arm so he couldn’t see what was about to happen to him. He yanked the tooth out root and all. The man was impressed. Before the man could see his tools, he exited the room, while making some quip about being available for appendixes too.
      Gregg was married at 17 to Odella, who worked for his parents. She had eight or nine cows, as did he, so they had almost 20 when they were married.
      He was still driving a team and wagon, or riding horses, for several years while most of his peers were driving ‘36-37 Fords and Chevys. But all the while, he was building up his cattle herd. He was breaking the worst horses people brought to him, and riding green colts for others - doing all he could to build up a herd.
      Gregg’s first place of his own was in the Joe Creek area.
      Before he was done, he’d achieve considerable success as a rancher.
      Gregg is justifiably proud of the ranch he built almost from scratch on the edge of Harold (Pat Cowan helped him buy the place) - network of corrals, three shops, many outbuildings, a palatial yard - but bangs (a disease that causes cows to slip their calves prematurely) almost broke him. He had to sell out, and went to work for Ross Van Balen - the first time in his life off the family ranch.
      Two Texas men with a South Dakota ranch begged Gregg to take care of their longhorn herd for them. He decided he would help them out for a year. The year turned into three years.
      Then the Texans, who also had two large feedlots, invited him to work for them in Texas. They told him all he’d have to do was go through and cull out the sick ones. They would fly him down, and give him a house.
      Gregg decided he’d stay in South Dakota, despite the generous offer.
      His nephew Terry Gregg owns the place he lives on now.
      His son Arthur owns the old home place (the home that Kenneth built in more recent times) just to the north of Ken’s small house. Just to the east is another small old house that Terry pulled in for Ken to use as a shop. He’s got his lathe out there now.
      Gregg says the flooding caused by the damming of the Missouri really destroyed his three ranches. “I had the place set up so there was no way they could break me,” he says. “I had alfalfa, timber, water springs, etc.”
      But the water took 600 acres. He negotiated hard with Corps, and eventually got about $100 an acre. “But you couldn’t have paid me enough,” he said.
      “Before that happened, I had 90 stacks of hay left over in the spring,” he said.
      “The way I had it set up - my son, and his son could survive. No way in the world they could break me. We were never going to freeze to death, because we had timber. And we had water, of course. If we got hungry enough, we could always fish.
      People used to come from Harrold to fill up wagons with wood that ranchers in the area gave to them.
      “It was nothing to see 15 or 20 sets of Indian trails in the area in those days. They would pitch tents beside our dams,” he said. “This pocket used to be full of Indian people. They were good old boys.”
      The tribes own about two-thirds of the land in the area where Gregg lives. When his father first moved into the area, they had to check in before you came onto your property. They didn’t let just anybody come down here, he says. Until they knew you, anyway.
     
      Gregg sold his land and cattle to Arthur, who has four children: Jim, Becky, Bonnie, and Danelle.
      Gregg says he’s really proud of his son Arthur. “He keeps up the place real good, and he takes good care of his family.”
      “He couldn’t have married a better woman,” he adds, “and I think the world of all the grandchildren.”
      “If I were a millionaire I wouldn’t feel any different than I do right now,” he says. “I love to see my family getting along well.”
      Ken’s dad was one of nine children. Etta, for example, lived to be 100 (in Kimball) “She kept herself up like she came out of a doll house,” Ken says. “She never let anyone look after her.”
      Ken’s brother Scott ranches north of Holabird. Sister Bonnie (Bartlett) lives in Gregory (Note: Her son Scott doubled for Wyatt Earp and the Masterson Brothers in the Movie Wyatt Earp.) Sam, Mary and Heather have died of cancer. Bob is in his 80s.
      Ken lost his cousin Bernard Gregg to a freak accident - he was run over by a car between Harrold and Highmore one night. Ken says his cousin was starting to win at the big rodeos.
     
      “I’ve done just about everything,” he says, noting his musical endeavors, when he played guitar and sang with many of the local musical standouts. “Danny Hall would come over and we’d sit and play for hours.” He played and sang all night one night with Duane and Diane Big Eagle, either on his old Fender Jazzmaster, or his Martin flattop.
      “Hear a song twice, and I could play it,” he brags.
      Gregg grew up on people like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. When he was a kid, Gregg remembers Duane’s dad “Red” Big Eagle was over at their house playing piano all the time.
      He says his son has an old cylinder record player and some of the earliest songs he’s heard. Such as: “I’m Getting Ready for My Mother-In-Law,” “Ghostdance,” and the “Dark Town Poker Club.”
      He likes Phil Harris’ “Boll Weevil.” And there is a song called “Seven Beaus with the Wrong Woman” and its send-up called “Seven Beaus with the Wrong Man.”
      “These are not dirty,” he says, “but they are comical.”
      There was a song called “A Bad Brahma Bull,” that his dad often sang at the Ft. Pierre Rodeo.
      Gregg hasn’t really found much to like in the new singers: “Used to be the words mattered. There were stories in the songs of George Jones and Hank Williams. You could understand every word. Today, the band is turned up so loud, I can’t turn my hearing aid up to understand the words.”
      About the so-called “good-old days” Gregg says, “I’m glad I seen ‘em. I wouldn’t want to go back to ‘em. When I was a kid I had to haul buckets of water from down to the well. We had an outdoor toilet. The upstairs where the kids slept was so hot, we’d have to stay outdoors half the night.”
     
      Gregg doesn’t think much of the movie they made with Casey Tibbs. “He damn-near drowned too!” Gregg notes. “It was not a good movie,” he says. “Maybe people in the city might like it … horses buck when there is no reason to buck … you could pick it apart, but why bother?”
      “Casey was the only guy I know of who could ride with these guys today,” Gregg says.
      Gregg notes that his uncle Bernie Gregg, and Scott Hall, were the only two that stayed with Casey Tibbs when he went broke trying to start rodeos in Japan.
      “You want a story, go straight east of Mac’s Corner and you’ll eventually get to the three Etbauer boys,” Gregg says. “Billy was four-time saddle bronc champ. You just don’t find three brothers that good.”
     

Larry Larson, living miracle
By Bruce Hope 1998

     Larry Larsen's story transcends the typical late bloomer's business success story.
      Actually, it's not really a story of late blooming, but of rebirth, literally. And a whole new view of life. And then growing into a second career and, gradually, a sense of purpose.
      Larry Larsen grew up on the family farm near Reliance. After his father died, he and his family took it over, and even continued to farm after he’d become a tax accountant working for Ketel-Thorstenson of Rapid City, the largest independent CPA firm in five states. But we’re getting ahead of our story.
      The story really begins with a farm injury. Larry and his hired man were replacing a motor in an 830 John Deere windrower, lowering the engine when it swung a little wide and struck Larry in the knee cap. "It hurt like hell," he remembers, but he didn't do anything about it then, since the blow didn't break the skin. When the pain continued in the following weeks, he finally went to a doctor.
      Disaster struck on Friday the 13th of September. He was doctoring with the third or fourth doctor, still trying to figure out the knee problem. None of the doctors had succeeded in making things any better. His knee was incredibly swollen, and he was examined on this occasion in Pierre by a Dr. Spears, who made the same examination that all the others had. But she prescribed some medicine that she said would make him feel a lot better. And he did feel a lot better.
      But as a side effect, the medicine killed him.
      Elaine had tried to get Larry into Dr. Spear’s Clinic on Friday afternoon. She was told by the office staff that they’d have to wait until Saturday morning at 9 a.m. He didn’t appear to be near death. On the race to Pierre that next morning, an unusual thing happened.
      As his wife was racing him to the hospital in Pierre, he experienced his first out-of-body experience. He remembers being right at the substation north of Fort Thompson. He looked down and saw himself lying in the car. Then he was looking into a long, light grey tunnel, with - you guessed it - a light at the end. ‘It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’ he says, unapologetic about the generic sound of his vision. (Later he would talk to many others who had experienced this phenomenon, and the experiences are almost all the same.) ‘The thing I remember is the freedom,’ Larsen said later. ‘The freedom from all physical and mental pressure - the light and the freedom were like nothing on earth, and very comforting besides. All fears were gone at that moment.’
      Because of the pain he was undergoing, he had been praying to die. When he saw the tunnel, he felt a presence, and said ‘I’m ready. Here I am.’
      A ‘voice of authority’ (the most he can say about it) said, ‘It’s not your time yet.’
      His attention turned to his three children in the car, all staring intently at his lifeless body, and his wife frantically driving the car. Larry suddenly understood that it was his family’s prayers that were being answered - not his. Suddenly he was back in his body, throwing up, sick and miserable again.
      They figured out later that the medicine carried the toxins from his knee - an internal staph infection - throughout his system. ‘The toxic material got around my heart,’ he said, ‘and stopped my heart.’
      Dr. Spears was unavailable until 11 a.m., when she examined his knee, realized he had no blood pressure, was totally dehydrated, and definitely should be checked into the hospital. Then she was busy calling in a couple of other doctors who knew more about such cases and neglected to inform the emergency room that he was on the way, so they wouldn’t let him in. ‘Get away from the buzzer, you kids,’ came the voice over the intercom.
      He was finally let in, and put in a wheelchair. Since it was the weekend, in those days children were not allowed to hang around, so Larry’s wife Elaine was sent off to dispose of the kids somewhere (step brother in Fort Pierre). His only support, and the only coherent voice, was sent off on a silly errand to keep the children out of the hospital. Meanwhile a nurse was interrogating Larry, who could not walk or get up, but was still talking. She was trying to get all of this information out of him, and luckily began taking his pulse at one point as well. Finding no pulse in the normal places, she heard Larry say, ‘Try my neck. If there’s no pulse there, then I probably don’t have any.’
      Sure enough, there was none, and the fact that he was still talking was not lost on the nurse, who then called for help. Dr. Spears had called in Dr. Hoffsten and Dr. Huber. Hoffsten had studied for just this sort of emergency, as it turns out - no blood pressure, and kidney failure.
      Larsen heard him scolding the entire staff: ‘This guy came in here with a 10 percent chance of living, and you guys have cut that in half!’
      Because he had no blood pressure, the nurses could find no veins to insert IVs, but Hoffsten had no problem finding the veins, Larsen said. Hoffsten then got Larsen into Intensive Care, where he stayed with him until 6 a.m. Sunday morning, after advising Larsen’s wife and mother to find a place away from the hospital to rest. Then Hoffsten went home to study what he was going to do next.
      A lull
      Larsen’s grandfather Nels homesteaded in northeast Tripp County, just south of Reliance, in 1909. In his office Larry keeps an old rifle with a bayonet, that belonged to his grandfather. Like most old objects, there’s a story. When Larry was eight or nine, he was playing with the other kids in the barn, on a collapsed hayloft, sliding down into the hay, when he kicked this thing in the hay. Excitedly he ran to his aunt with the news and was told that his grandfather had purchased the gun at the ordnance depot in Omaha.
      Nels was having some health problems, and doctors recommended that he try South Dakota where the burgeoning use of Artesian wells might provide him the mineral supplements he seemed to be lacking. He had bought the rifle before he left, to use for long-range protection. Larry’s father would later tell him that he saw Nels down a coyote at a distance of a half a mile.
      Larry’s dad broke many horses in his time. ‘He was very good at it,’ Larry says. ‘Horses would do about anything he wanted them to do.’
      Round two
      Larsen’s heart quit again Sunday about 9:30 a.m. He remembers all the beepers and machines going off, stirring up the whole hospital again. He was still very sick. His temperature had gone way up and way down. And then it happened again.
      This time he was taken on a interdimensional tour by a shadowy figure he guesses to have been an angel. They traveled to Larsen’s home church - Trinity Lutheran in Chamberlain - where Pastor Ed Nesselhuff was kneeling at the altar, praying for Larsen. He had just explained Larsen’s situation to the congregation and was speaking a prayer. Larsen looked into three faces in that congregation, two of which were crying. He has never told anyone who they were.
      The following Wednesday, Pastor Nesselhuff came to visit Larsen. ‘You prayed for me Sunday,’ Larsen said. ‘Yes,’ said Nesselhuff. Then Larsen went on to repeat the pastor’s prayer back to him. Nesselhuff was dumbstruck.
      Round three’
      There would be another heart attack later when the dialysis machine removed about three times the normal fluid, causing a shock to his body. Larsen would ask Hoffsten, ‘Is this a real heart attack’’ and Hoffsten replied that it was.
      Tuesday morning, Larsen had been put on dialysis. That night, Dr. Spears was standing with an elbow in one hand and her chin in the other, as Larsen recalls, watching as another blood sample was being taken, when all the bells and whistles went off again. Dr. Hoffsten happened to be just coming down the hall with the voltage machine - the one with the paddles - headed for Larsen’s room.
      ‘Do you do this every time they take blood,’ Dr. Spears asked Larsen, as Hoffsten was getting set up. Hoffsten applied the paddles, and Larsen says he’s sure he raised off the bed at least four inches. The electrical charge blew the shunt out of Larsen’s arm (the shunt bypassed a removed artery) and blood was splattering all over Hoffsten’s glasses.
      Then Hoffsten was grinning from ear to ear, with all this blood on his face. Larsen asked him why he was grinning.
      ‘It’s great when these things work!’ Hoffsten replied, referring to the paddles having accomplished their purpose.
      Larsen would not have lived if not for Dr. Hoffsten. After applying the paddles, Hoffsten performed emergency surgery on the spot to reinstall the shunt in Larsen’s arm.
      Dr. Hoffsten told Larry’s wife Elaine that he would be in the hospital a good three months. It was only 28 days before the viewing window in the shunt in his arm quit pulsing, and he knew that his kidneys were functioning again, and he could go home.
      As it turned out, many coincidental factors had contributed to Larsen’s survival. Hoffsten had trained in just this sort of problem. The hospital was just getting their dialysis machine, and a couple of the staff had just returned (the day before he was admitted) from a training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They had been taught that they might see an acute patient, like Larsen was, perhaps once every 10 years, so they weren’t exactly prepared for that. But one technician from the Mayo flew out to help them through the initial stages and the one nurse named Esther, who had trained with the dialysis machine, stayed beside Larsen for two shifts - 16 hours straight. And there were other factors too numerous to mention. Lots of help.
      A change of life
      The whole experience completely changed everything in Larsen’s life. ‘The way I do things, the way I feel, the way I act. I have more energy, more drive, than I used to. I sleep only four-six hours a night. And just like everybody who’s had these experiences, I don’t fear death any more.’
      ‘It’s been hard on my family - mainly, hard for them to keep up!’ Larsen says without jest.
      Throughout 1980, knee injury and all, Larsen had continued to run a large cow-calf herd year-round. The had a good-sized farrow-to-finish hog operation. Between fall of 1980 and spring of 1981, they liquidated all the livestock and went to summer fallow and winter wheat. Larsen sold his tractors and bought one that had a cushion seat that would be more hospitable to his back, kidney and knee problems.
      Because of the heart attacks, Larsen knew there was some minor brain damage. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to remember things well enough to go back to school. He underwent psychological evaluation at the University of Arizona in March, 1981, to determine the state of the loss. In a lengthy report, they basically told him that he’d had some damage, but that he could probably go back and do ‘C’ work.
      In June, Larsen bought a house in Rapid City on a five-year contract, committed to going back to school and getting his degree. His wife got a job teaching at a nearby country school. Larsen averaged 19 hours a semester, earning degrees in computer science, business administration and accounting from National College of Business (Now National American University). He served on the student senate four years, played on the college softball team, and was the student representative on the committee to hire a new president at the college.
      ‘College was the most enjoyable time of my life,’ he says. ‘The kids treated me very well, and I still keep in contact with most of my instructors.’
      He used to be a slow reader. Now he sometimes reads a novel in a night. Sometimes he has two or three books going at once. ‘I really enjoy continuing to learn,’ he says. ‘There is a wealth of information out there, and I’d like to learn it all.’
      While he was in the hospital, Larsen kept asking God ‘What is it you want me to do’’ ‘I wanted something to do now. I wanted an answer. It didn’t come. It took me years to figure out what he wanted.’
      ‘Going to school for accounting was not my life’s dream. I was not sure I even liked it when I was going to school. It wasn’t until later, when a woman in tears thanked me for helping her and her husband out of an IRS jam that I realized that I had found a small area I could help in.’
      ‘Overall, the biggest changes that took place in me were two, Larsen says: ‘The energy ‘ and learning how important people are. And I mean everybody. In my practice, I don’t look at the client’s ability to pay. I don’t look at the billing to see if anyone’s paid or not paid in the last couple of years.’
      The Larsen office today
      The Larsen building has recently been remodeled to accommodate new work spaces, and a couple extra offices to accommodate the growing work load. Larsen’s office is the only one that wasn’t improved in the process.
      Larsen has several pieces of Navajo art on the wall behind his desk. One is a bow and arrow set, lined with fur and elaborately beaded. The other is a ‘snake stick’ (used by shamans to hold the head of a rattlesnake on the ground so the snake can be picked up and put into a bag) and hammer. The expensive gifts were given in honor of his last two birthdays. The circumstances of their acquisition say a lot about Larsen’s business style.
      Childers’ Builders is a large construction corporation in Farmington, New Mexico, and the main shareholder, Bruce Childers, came to Larsen with a big IRS problem. They were hasseling him on his personal taxes, levying his accounts. They had taken about $10,000 when Larsen was contacted, recommended by someone who’d used Larsen, and knew Childers.
      Larsen went down through his books, redid his returns, and got all the money back. They dropped all the pursuit and sent Childers check for more than he’d paid in, with interest.
      But they had discovered that the company bookkeeping had been very sloppy, prior to 1993. Larsen had discovered the same thing, and had trained Childers’ daughter to do the bookkeeping after that. But the IRS still audited the 1992 books, and the corporation was in bad shape. Both Larsen and the IRS auditor knew it.
      The audit was scheduled for an upcoming workweek, a five-day period. In the days before that week rolled around, Larsen applied himself to the task of redoing the entire 1992 books from scratch. It took probably eight full days. When time for the audit came that Monday, Larsen showed the auditor the old books, and the new books - the way it should have been done. The auditor accepted the new books, which showed Childers owing some money, as they should have, and the audit was done by Wednesday noon.
      Childers wanted to give Larsen a bonus, but under the ethical code of accounting, Larsen cannot take any more than payment for the hours billed. However, there is no law saying that a client can’t buy a nice gift for him at his next birthday, or even his next two birthdays. And that’s where the Navajo art works came from.
      The office beginnings
      Ketel-Thorstenson started a part-time Chamberlain branch office in 1987. Larsen commuted to Chamberlain on Saturdays, and gathered a growing number of clients over the next nine years. The commuting was soon taking up too much time, so Ketel-Thorstenson rented him an office, where Morningstar is now. ‘It was an old library table - Bud Thorstenson’s first desk - and two chairs,’ Larsen says, ‘and I still have the table.’ Larsen says that Thorstenson has remained a good friend over the years, even though Larsen’s split with the company involved some arbitration. ‘He’s probably the best person in the state to have on an IRS audit,’ Larsen says.
      Larsen hired Barb Nies, now Barb Gakin, full time seven years ago. At the time she was working as a ‘stripper’ at Register-Lakota Printing, where her husband-to-be, Curt Gakin, was also working. Larsen remembers the streets of downtown Chamberlain being all torn up - when all of Main Street was replaced, including sewer lines and sidewalks.
      ‘Barb couldn’t come down Main Street so she had to walk down the alley and come around the building. There she came in her business suit, in the very sloppy mud, to interview for the position.’ She would later interview at the main office in Rapid City also.
      She was hired with a guarantee of a 32-hour minimum per week, and that she has never worked less than 40 hours since she started - in fact, she’s worked some overtime almost every week. Larsen says that when he separated from the parent company, they tried to get her, but that she stayed on with him.
      It was a somewhat complicated negotiation when he left the company, since they had provided him the format to get the customers, even though it was his own skills and connections which played a part in the successful formula. They eventually reached a compromise, and he bought the client list and the accounts receivable from Ketel-Thorstenson.
      He is still in good standing with his former employer. John Walker, the managing partner, is one of Larsen’s closest friends. Larsen figures he was probably the third senior tax accountant at Ketel-Thorstenson, who employs about 80 professionals, when he left. He still works in close association with them on certain projects. An example: the Tri-County Landfill audit. Ketel-Thorstenson has experts in this area. Landfills have a lot of rules and compliances they have to conform to - they have to comply with five different agencies, and they are audited every two years.
      ‘I did a lot of the footwork, the bookkeeping and reviewing, as well as doing the presentations,’ Larsen said, ‘and they do the expertise work.’ He explains that it would cost him an enormous amount in research to do it himself.
     
      The last few days, a man from the state Auditing Division, Department of Labor was in Larsen’s conference room auditing the payroll records of one of Larsen’s clients. ‘Their big concern nowadays,’ Larsen says, ‘is whether the unemployment benefits are being paid properly.’ There is a new law, Lason adds - if you hire new employees, you must report it to the state. They also look at claims for contract labor, for example. He notes that there have only been four payroll audits in four years from among his 600-plus clients.
      Federal audits are a little more frequent, but still average only about four a year. Half of those are Larsen’s regular clients, and the other half are clients who come to them seeking help with audits. Last year when the IRS was getting all the heat, Larsen explains, they didn’t ‘pull’ [randomly select] any tax returns to audit (of course they still audited the returns they found problems with). Now the IRS is reorganized, and back at it this year. Returns are pulled and scheduled out of Fargo, N.D., Larsen says, but the majority of the staff come out of Rapid City. (The collection and enforcement people are centered in Sioux Falls, while the problem-solving group - tax-payer advocates - are centered at the Aberdeen office. Larsen mentions the name of the head of the Aberdeen office, Mary Hickey, whom he has known since the mid-80s. ‘She’s a very good consumer advocate,’ he says. They used to have the problems-resolution office in Aberdeen, but that has moved to St. Paul, Minn.
      The Larsen family
      Larry’s wife Elaine teaches second grade in Kennebec. While they lived in Rapid City, she taught for 10 years in country school (Farmingdale) and three years in the town of New Underwood.
      Elaine and Larry’s son Jon was hired by OEM in Watertown when he was a freshman at Lake Area Vocational-Technical School, and has risen to the status of trouble-shooter in the electronics manufacturing plant. He works in conjunction with the computer engineers who design the boards and install chips. Jon tests all outgoing boards (manufactures all the test equipment, as well), and then writes the manuals on maintenance, testing, etc. (Larry has a brother-in-law who works in one of a handful of similar companies in the Watertown area).
      Larsen says the plant is very interesting to tour. You have to wear lab coats, and be demagnetized. ‘You can absolutely fry a board just by touching it if you have a lot of electricity,’ he says. Larsen notes that the people who work in the labs for extended periods of time remain ‘plugged in’ while they’re there to prevent the buildup of static electricity.
      ‘Jon waited three years before going to school,’ Larry says. ‘It was the best thing he ever did. When he went to school, he knew what he wanted to do, and he applied himself to it. He is a pretty good finish carpenter (he did the interior finishing for Todd Orth on the Rancour house that recently burned), but he could see that it was going to be hard as a carpenter’s assistant.
      Their daughter Leslie is attending South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She has degrees in history, French and English from South Dakota State University, Brookings, and now is working on a degree in either computer engineering or electrical engineering. She could have gone to work elsewhere but wants to stay in the western United States. She interviews with Microsoft for an internship this spring.
      Their daughter Lori Engel is an LPN at Mid-Dakota Hospital - one of the two surgical nurses here. Her husband Todd is a hunting and fishing guide employed by Thunderstik Lodge. They have two children: Cathy (sixth grade) and Michael (first grade).
     
     

Michael Feldman, "Not much, you?"
By Bruce Hope April 02

     Michael Feldman will broadcast his Saturday morning NPR program "Whad'ya Know?" live from the Washington Pavilion at 10 a.m. CST May 18. Feldman will interview local people, feature local and national musicians and celebrities, while entertaining with his characteristic wit and charm.

Missouri River land reverts to tribes, state
By Bruce Hope 99

     Note: Since this was written, Senate Bill 1341 passed.
     
      If Senate Bill 1341 passes, all of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recreation areas would transfer back to the State of South Dakota or to the tribes whose reservations they currently inhabit. Not only will all the property now controlled by the Corps be ceded to the state or tribes (and money generated from recreation areas will follow with transfering of control) - and this includes everything but the dams themselves - but the most recent proposals seek to put the hydroelectric power income from the dams in trust to be split by the tribes and the state, depending on the proportionate amount of land.
      The Corps of Engineers will still operate the dams. Part of the bill is language prohibiting anyone from interfering with the Corps in that operation.
      Passage of this bill will effectively do away with most of the Corps of Engineers employees’ jobs in this area, and will also transfer control and revenue to the state and to the tribes. To some, these are national recreation areas, and should remain under federal control. Out-of-staters will pay more to camp, to reserve campgrounds, some feel.
      One of the results of the passage of this bill will be development right up to the river’s edge. Another reason that people have opposed the bill is that they like the buffer zone along the river.
      Eric Washburn, Sen. Daschle’s legislative director, has done a lot of work on 1341. According to Washburn, the bill is probably in its latest of 15-20 incarnations, and its latest official name is the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and State of South Dakota Terrestrial Wildlife Habitat Restoration Act. This bill is part of the Water Resources Development Act, which comes around every two years, and is the legislation that authorizes the Corps of Engineers to do what they do in every state in the union (flood control and the like, for example).
      If 1341 passes, approximately 25 percent of the revenue from the dams’ hydroelectric powers will be allowed to accrue in trust until a total of $167 million is accumulated (a little over three years). The state and the two tribes will collect six percent of their respective shares on an annual basis. The state, with $108 million in the account, will derive about $6.5 million annually; Cheyenne River will get six percent of $42 million, or $2.52 million, and Lower Brule will get six percent of $15 million, or around $900,000 annually.
      All river recreational areas will be transferred to the state or the tribe, depending on the locations.
      The tribes will get the “take land” - that strip of land along the river which is a buffer zone for flooding, and which the Corps of Engineers has strictly administered for many years.
      “The jurisdiction issues are so controversial and unbelievably complicated, that we have pretty much left the status quo as ruled in the Bourland Decision,” Washburn says, “which provides that the state has jurisdiction over hunting and fishing outside the reservation, and also retains authority over non-Indians within the reservation.
      The transfer of the land from the Corps to the state and tribes will be phased in over a four or five year period, according to Washburn. (Note: Since the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe has not chosen to participate in this agreement, those areas of Lake Sharpe and Lake Francis Case will remain under the control of the Corps of Engineers.)
     
     

Paleontology near Chamberlain
By Bruce Hope 1998

     James Lindley, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Chamberlain, went out with paleontologists from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Aug. 3 and found a prehistoric squid.
      As an example of the cooperative efforts of the Corps and the State of South Dakota, the two entities had cost-shared on a small boat to travel along the banks of the Missouri, looking for specimens of paleontological interest, and the group was taking the boat for a test run when they stumbled onto some significant remnants of the Cretaceous Period (the age of dinosaurs).
      When Dr. Jim Martin and Emily Marden took the boat out the next day to excavate, they found the whole hillside had sloughed in on the specimen. So Martin shoveled for several hours to unearth the fossil. When they left the day before, they had piled rocks on top of the find in order to protect it. The caving in of the hillside, made crushed gravel of those rocks, but only put a small crack in the squid, luckily.
      “Pretty good considering there was half a ton of rock on it.
      “My mother told me to get an education and not dig ditches,” Martin joked Thursday after he returned from the dig covered with dirt. “You don’t want to look like your dad when he comes out of the coal mine,” his mother had added.
      Martin’s father was in fact a coal miner in Rock Springs, Wyo. (originally from Oklahoma), , who came to Edgemont, S.D., to work in the uranium mine there when Jim was four years old. Jim’s father died of black lung disease when Jim was 11.
      Like his father, Jim likes to dig, but he prefers to do it in the open air.
      The squid is pseudoteuthis a denizen of the Cretaceous Period.
      Martin has been extremely impressed with the way the Corps and the State have been working together on the paleontology expeditions he has led.
      The previous Thursday, a chilly and windy evening, Jack Mueller hosted the annual Paleontology Banquet, where the Chamberlain Area Historical Preservation Association (CAHPA) and other Chamberlain people gather to honor the paleontologists who have been working in the area for several years.
      “There is a lot of community support here,” Martin says.
      Martin, and Dr. Gordon Bell, and others completed the second two-week session of the summer last Thursday. This year, they were working three of those four weeks on the extraction of a 12-foot turtle from a hillside in the Big Bend area. It took 14 large plaster jackets (casts) to get it out, Martin said. “It was a large animal, and pretty spread-out.”
      They won’t know if it is actually an archelon until they get it “prepared” in the lab at SDSM&T, he says. “There was not enough of it exposed to be certain,” he says, “and it’s better to be conservative rather than to insist on knowing while you’re in the field.”
      “I know we’ve got something cool,” Martin says, “and we just don’t know what else it would be, but it is also awfully large, and earlier in the strata than these have been found.”
      “So there’s still a little mystery,” he adds, smiling, “and not knowing is fun.”
      They also excavated part of another mosasaur. “This one was pretty beat up, and in 30 feet of solid rock. These were not much for display-worthy specimens,” Martin said, “but they are scientifically interesting. Everything helps in our effort to learn just where they existed in time and how they changed through time, and how they became extinct.”
      Where one walks along the beach in the area north of St. Joseph’s Indian School, and views the layered cliffs, with their sloughings of piles of flat rocks and shale pieces, one walks on the Niobrara Formation. There one looks up at the broad layers of light and dark which comprise the Pierre Shale.
      Another thing the paleontologists are pursuing is a good look at the Crow Creek member of the Pierre Shale - a cream-colored, rather than black, layer which can be seen in the strata revealed by the river in places (with black layer above and below They are exploring the possibility that a great tsunami may have occurred. There is also a theory of a large meteor impact, which would account for more ashes than usual.
      Current plans for Drs. Martin and Bell include a return trip to the Chamberlain area for a couple weeks or more in September. Dr. Bell is one of the world’s leading experts on creatures like the mosasaur.
      “This area - the Missouri River - is a priority for me,” Martin says. “So I will be back, especially as long as I have this great cooperation between the Corps and the School of Mines.”
      Martin has a project to finish up in Oregon this summer, and has no immediate plans to return to South America or Antarctica, the sites of some of his recent work.
      He and Dr. Bell are getting closer to completion of another major undertaking - the definitive book on Mosasaurus conondon - for which artist Barbara Rowe has almost completed the paintings and drawings. She has the one major painting left to do - a color restoration of that “tyrannosaurus rex of the sea” which once covered much of the western hemisphere. Martin and Bell will compile the text for the landmark geological text.
      “Her drawings are great,” Martin says.
      Martin is also excited about plans for a science center in Chamberlain. CAHPA and the Lake Francis Case Development Corporation (LFCDC) have been working on funding for the project.
     
     
      by Bruce Benham, editor
      The paleontologists from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T), along with students and volunteers from all over the U.S., are working in the Chamberlain area once again this summer. According to project director Dr. James Martin, the Corps of Engineers has been a lot of help to the group in the past, and they hope to enlist their aid in removing the prehistoric 12-foot sea turtle from its tomb in a sidehill along the river several miles north of Fort Thompson. They are hoping to get the big turtle out this summer, but because it is in such a remote area along the river, they are dependent upon good weather.
      Returning paleontologists are Drs. James Martin, David Parris, and Gordon Bell.
      “It it rains at all, this area is inaccessible,” Martin says.
      It is very rough country, with a lot of large rocks, and accessible only by high-clearance four-wheel-drives.
      Again, coming all the way from the East Coast, is Kent Knock and his daughter Moriah, along with Moriah’s friend Cydney, and family friend Michael Lin.
      Besides the sea turtles, the group may do some work on a mosasaur site. Mosasaurs were the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the ocean which covered the center of the continent from Alaska to Central America in the age of the dinosaurs.
      The turtle they are working on was believed last year to be an archelon, Martin says, but they have found some different features causing them to question that theory.
      “We won’t really know until we’ve had the specimens back in the lab (at SDSM&T),” Martin says.
      The paleontology group will be working around Chamberlain for the entire month of August - two two-week sessions in which students and others pay for the experience.
      It may still be possible to sign up for the second session, Martin says. Anyone interested should call Ruthie at 394-2467.
     
      by Bruce Benham, editor
      Among the dead creatures one finds buried beneath the surface of the earth, some of the most interesting, world-class specimens are being exhumed along the Missouri River in central South Dakota. Take, for example, the 80-million-year-old turtle (archelon ischyros) - with a shell 12 feet across (perhaps 20 feet from flipper to flipper), the largest turtle that ever lived - that has already taken much of two summers to uncover northwest of Fort Thompson. The “dig” is still on and won’t be completed this summer either. In a few days, paleontologists will cover what’s showing with plaster and burlap, and resume next summer. An earlier archelon (there have been four decent ones found so far) was discovered by South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T) then-doctoral student Bruce Schumacher. (Appropriately, “hard rockers” are doing most of the serious paleontology, or study of fossils, in South Dakota.) The archelon they are currently working on was found by a student from New Jersey.
      Last Friday was the last day of an SDSM&T class in field paleontology at sites along the Missouri. The group has been living in tents in American Creek Campground, and commuting to sites up the river, on the Crow Creek Reservation, digging up these contemporaries of the dinosaurs, whose existence dates to just a couple million years before the dinosaurs became extinct.
      Besides the protracted and painstaking process of uncovering the skeletal puzzle pieces with chisels, dental picks and paintbrushes, in the blistering mid-summer heat of the arid Missouri River bluffs, the paleontologists face other major obstacles. To get to the archelon site a few miles north of Fort Thompson and turns off-road for several more miles of road that varies from deep ruts to near non-existence, through thick, tall weeds that often conceal the large boulders strewn across the forbidding $140/acre range. It rides like a testing ground for four-wheel-drives. You can get a couple miles in with a two-wheel drive if you don’t mind risking all sorts of damage to your undercarriage, but you are only about a fourth of the way there, and the hard part of the journey is still ahead of you.
      So, how do you transport the fossil remains of something that size once you’ve uncovered it?
      “The Corps of Engineers has been extremely helpful over the years,” says Dr. James E. Martin, SDSM&T professor of geology and Museum of Geology curator of vertebrate paleontology, and they may end up providing the answer to that question. Park Manager A.D. “Connie” Olson, of the Big Bend Corps office, says the National Guard might be able to airlift the turtle out, but they would have to send a fuel truck too, since they can’t make it from Rapid City without refueling.
      Another option, according to Corps Area Project Manager Bob Pletka, might be transporting by barge, since the dig site is so close to the river. The only problem is that it’s too shallow along the water’s edge in that area of the river. One solution, according to Pletka, might be to build a temporary levee.
      The fossil bones themselves are much like [black] glass, Martin says, hard but brittle and breakable. Part of the problem with the archelon specimen is that it’s embedded in manganese nodules, which are also black and unexplainably omnipresent in that area along the river. And the turtle bones are less refined, and therefore harder to distinguish from their surroundings, than, for instance, mosasaur bones, so the process requires incredible patience.
      Dr. Jim Martin came to the Missouri River first when they found a mosasaur near the Gettysburg Bridge in 1989. One of his associates spent about three years picking the skull out of solid rock. Martin says it wasn’t an important specimen, as far as articulation is concerned, but it was important because of the location and the data that it supplied about how things change with each stratigraphic layer in time. Martin himself spent two years there, and in his constant dealings with the Corps of Engineers (much of the work is on Corps property), he began talking with Corps people from the Chamberlain area.
      “Dale Lundquist helped a lot,” he says.
      Knowing this country as well as he did - by horseback, vehicle and airplane - from years with the Corps in the Fort Thompson office, Connie Olson told Dr. Martin where to look a few years ago. Dr. Martin says, “I got out of the Suburban, and found a mosasaur vertebrae.”
      The 30-foot-long mosasaurus conondon of the Late Cretaceous Period - lizard-like, an alligator with flippers, the top carnosaur in the water, T-Rex of the sea, air-breathing, saltwater reptile, and a distant relative of the Komodo dragon - inhabited a great inland ocean (the Niobrara Sea) that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole. They have been and are being discovered especially in the Pierre Shale formation, whose best exposures are along the Missouri River. The two mosasaur sites currently under excavation are in hillsides near the river, a few miles upriver from Fort Thompson. In those visible strata, some of the earth’s most interesting prehistory is being pieced together.
      Dr. Martin - who played football at Edgemont High School - brings world-class experience to his work. He was one of three U.S. paleontologists chosen to participate with Argentine paleontologists in two joint field expeditions to the Vega Island area, just east of the Antarctica Peninsula in the past couple years. Adding support to the theory that a land bridge existed between Antarctica and the Americas, plesiosaurs (something like the legendary Loch Ness monster), mosasaurs and a duck-billed dinosaur were unearthed there. Similarly, in the Museum of Geology, SDSM&T has a duck-billed dinosaur excavated on Standing Rock Reservation north of Isabel over 50 years ago, and, of course, several plesiosaurs and mosasaurs from South Dakota. The Chamberlain Area Historical Preservation Society has procured the property at Exit 263 to build a temperature-controlled museum to eventually house some of the area’s significant fossil finds, which are now in storage at the School of Mines.
      Dr. Gorden L. Bell, Jr. - perhaps the world’s foremost mosasaur expert - came from the University of Texas for a post-doctoral fellowship at SDSM&T specifically to study “Lucky Mo,” discovered near Chamberlain in 1992 - and the most complete specimen of the species in the world, according to Bell. He is still here.
      At the Aug. 13 appreciation picnic for the paleontologists, hosted annually by CAHPA at the Jack Mueller residence in Chamberlain, Parrish said “The Bible says a person cannot serve two masters ... but I am working 50 weeks of the year for the New Jersey Museum and two weeks for SDSM&T.”
      It is not coincidental that mosasauri have been unearthed in New Jersey, and that the first mosasaur unearthed in the middle of the country - and the best articulated anywhere - was found near Chamberlain.
      Lee Azure, a lifelong resident of the Crow Creek Reservation, was an instrumental force in the discovery and preservation of some 90 percent of these fossils in this area, according to Dr. Martin. He has long walked these hills and prairies and played an essential role by discovering, learning about, pointing out, and preserving, these artifacts for future generations.
      Among the participants in the summer paleontology class:
      David Parrish is the curator of the New Jersey State Museum, who has not only participated in, but has also raised funding for the South Dakota digs by bringing out a group of students and other paying volunteers every summer (individuals pay $400 for the two-week educational experience and adventure, and more if they are taking the class for credit). Students come from all over the country to learn about geological and paleontological techniques from Dr. Bell, Dr. Jim Martin, Dr. Phil Bjork, Mike Greenwald and others.
      One of the perks of Julie Smoragiewicz’s job as SDSM&T director of public relations is that she gets to participate in the summer field expeditions as photographer and publicist. She explains that part of the Museum of Geology’s mission is education, and that this field class is open to the public.
      Kent Knock, a civil engineer, brought his New Jersey family out on a “dig” for vacation in 1995. He believes it is valuable experience, not to mention a bonding adventure, for daughter Moriah, and stepson Michael Lin, who was the one who spotted a phalanx that turned out to be a finger bone of this mosasaurus. It was another student who discovered a large chunk of the femur of the great turtle that would be unearthed about 100 feet up the hillside from that turtle leg, in a spot seven miles up the river to the northwest.
      Whether taking the class for credit or not, everyone is required to do field notebooks, and Michael Lin’s field notebook shows a detailed drawing of the hillside, marked with the locations of various mosasaur bones.
      Chris Jobes, Longhorne, Pa., is a shaved head, body-pierced, sophomore in high school who came to learn.
      Mike Pollack is a New York Times staff editor who covers these digs - this is his job and also his hobby.
      Bill Sherman is a retired geological engineer who has worked as a full-time volunteer for several years. He read about it in the SDSM&T alumni magazine, The Hard Rocker.
      Barbara Grandstaff is a trained professor/paleontologist who has been coming out for the past few summers.
      In the Crow Creek Reservation
      On Wednesday, Aug. 12, Dr. Jim Martin and Dr. Gorden Bell are speculating out loud among a group of part-time paleontologists on a steep hillside overlooking the Missouri River not far from Fort Thompson. “This is a bit coarser grain than the typical shale,” Dr. Bell says. “See that light-colored band of silt in the hillside [like the divider in a layer cake] - this may have been caused by a tsunami [tidal wave],” says Dr. Martin. He points to a yellowish band a couple of inches wide encircling the hillside and notes that, “This would have been at least 20 times more powerful than Mt. St. Helen’s. The scattered ash from Mt. St. Helen’s would not have even registered in the geological record.”
      Paleontologists and geologists have only read fragments of the history book that is that layer cake. Drs. Martin and Bell and company have found mosasaurs at a lower level [strata], and at a higher level, but this is the first time they have found one in this middle level. Because the ones at the higher level (that lived most recently, in other words) differ significantly from those at the lower level (the oldest known specimens), the paleontologists are hopeful that this discovery in the middle elevation will tell them revealing secrets about the history of these parts of the animal kingdom that became extinct for reasons as yet unknown.
      The time lapse between the strata under examination is perhaps a couple million years. “A lot can happen in a couple million years, and it obviously did,” Martin says, explaining the difference between the mosasaurs at different stratigraphic layers. “Major evolutionary change can take place in as little as 100,000 years,” he says.
      Dr. Jim Martin and most of the group returned home last Saturday. Dr. Gorden Bell and a handful of students will stay on for another two weeks of work on the archelon and the mosasaurus sites.
      Digging for dinosaurs
      Other digs currently in progress in the region, according to Smoragiewicz, include a Jurassic site 15 miles west of Sundance, Wyo., where the cutting of Interstate 90 revealed what Martin called “the most significant dinosaur site in the Black Hills.... Every Jurassic dinosaur that is commonly known is here except stegosaurus,” he said. Because there are so many animals jumbled together, a major flood is suspected. They are unearthing an allosaur (like a T-Rex) and a camarasaur (like a brontosaurus) - the oldest dinosaurs found in the Black Hills - and some small primitive mammals dating back perhaps 150 million years, or 90 million years before the Black Hills were formed. Near Newcastle is an ankylosaur (armor-plated, mace-tailed).
      “There are a lot of things in that quarry [the Black Hills],” Smoragiewicz says.
      There is the “pig dig” near Interior, where they are exhuming giant pigs and rhinoceri. The Flint Hill dig, near Martin, features a group of undulants, the oreadons, which were horse-like animals.
      The archelon upriver from Fort Thompson is the fourth semi-well-articulated turtle that the SDSM&T group has excavated (presently, the best turtle quarry in the world is right here). According to Dr. Bell, they have found three edges of the turtle, but the fourth is still going out. Two of the New Jersey students stayed behind to help him another couple of days, and a new person, Mr. Sim, has arrived for the final two weeks of excavation work. Dr. Bell is disappointed Tuesday, since the two New Jersey people stayed over to help, the skies are grey, and rain is imminent, according to all the forecasts. If it should rain only a fraction of an inch, there would be no getting up the steep gumbo hills and out of that archelon site if they made it out there.
      So, Dr. Gorden Bell sits in American Creek Campground Tuesday, writing in his field journal. “The pen is the most important tool we have,” Dr. Martin says, of the importance of thorough journal-keeping. Bell may write a book someday about his pursuit of the mighty mosasaurus, but today, he is thinking about picking glass-like sea turtle bones out of manganese nodules. And he is thinking about creatures who haven’t seen the light of day for 65 or 100 million years.
     
     

Paleontology, excavating artifacts along the river
By Bruce Hope 1999

     A group of archaeologists and volunteers spent 10 days in the Fort Hale Bottom area about seven miles upriver from Chamberlain-Oacoma, on the west bank of the Missouri. They found a variety of fragments from several distinct layers of area history over the course of the 10-day dig which ended Sunday [Aug. 1, 1999].
      They were looking for artifacts - defined as anything made, used, or altered by man - in the cutbank of the Missouri River.
      Officially, it is the 17th Annual U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Volunteer Archaeological Project at 39LM57, Fort Lookout II. The written purpose of this USACE project is to identify the remaining archaeological components at the Ft. Lookout site, and recover data endangered by erosion of the shoreline portion of the site. The plan includes eventual stabilization (rip-rap) and protection of the site, while “enhancing the existing body of knowledge concerning Fort Lookout II, the Ft. Hale Bottom area, the fur trade era, and a number of prehistoric periods.”
      The Corps embarks upon a similar archaeological project every year at this same time (last week of July, first week of August), in a location somewhere between Fort Randall to Bismarck, N.D. Next year, they expect to be digging upriver, near the North Dakota border.
      The broad area of river bottom land (Ft. Hale Bottom) they were working on north of Oacoma last week has been home to multiple major occupation episodes (between 1820 and 1900), according to the project director’s research design: “Artifacts from the Woodland, Initial Middle Missouri, and Post-Contact Coalescent periods have been recorded as coming from this site and represent the Native American occupations that have occurred here. Overlying these levels is an historic component representing the fur trade era settlement. This component has been attributed to various interests present in the area at that time, including Fort Lookout II, the Sioux Agency, Military Fort Lookout, and any number of independent traders.”
      Part of the Corps agenda is to continue testing of the site to assess its potential eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places. Getting on the National Register is usually a better guarantee of a site’s survival. Last week’s “salvage work” will help decide if the site retains at least enough integrity to warrant further testing.
      Previous excavations of the area have been documented, according to the research design statement of project engineer Rick Harnois, but no single excavation has reflected the range of history they now know to be present in the strata.
      Locals (like Bart Blum, whose land that one crosses to get to the site) even attest to an excavation in the mid-80s for which no one has been able to locate any documentation.
      That Wednesday, a healthy breeze was keeping conditions favorable for work on the Missouri River site. Significant finds were made at all three of the excavations within the site. On-site lab director (and archaeologist) Rose Fosha was able to trot out an impressive display of objects, including: several beads made from the shell of a freshwater mollusk; a copper military button (a “boss” with the “US” imprint, off a hat or lapel, they think); many shards of pottery with distinctive hieroglyphic designs; a glass bead; a thumb scraper, and a piece of a label (stamped copper alloy) off a champagne bottle. Fosha has been a state archaeologist for nine years, and is in private contract with the Corps for digs such as these.
      How were they able to carve the beads so perfectly round, so perfectly small? No one can answer that question. Nor do they know how certain very dense, small, flat fishhooks were carved. How do they know the prehistoric beads were made from freshwater mollusks, and how do they know that they are old? That question is answered primarily by the stratigraphy - the level, or strata, in which they are found.
      They have uncovered a veritable treasure trove of tools at the Fort Lookout site, including a buffalo scapula and a deer scapula, which were used as scrapers or shovels. The soil is much grayer, and finer, in that area because of the high percentage of ashes. It was a fireplace.
      “The steep retouch along the edge of this tool,” Fosha explains, “tells you it’s a scraper (for cleaning hides).”
      “This knife was hafted into a wooden handle,” she says, referring to the stone knife with a groove for a wooden handle which was then tied tightly with sinew or rawhide.
      There are shaft abraders made of sandstone or scoria (a natural volcanic stone): the arrow shafts were run back and forth in the grooves in these stones to smooth them out.
      “Shaft straighteners were usually made of an animal rib bone,” she said.
      They also found more modern objects, such as square nails and window glass, which fuels the debate over whether the old Indian agency was in this location.
     
      The oldest of last week’s finds at 39LM57 are estimated to be in the 900-1,000 A. D. range, artifacts of an Indian culture which is predecessor to the Arikara and the Mandan (an early variant of Initial Middle Missouri). These latter tribes - nowadays associated with Lewis and Clark, Montana, and North Dakota - were drawn northward by the resources in the Missouri River bottomlands, and increasingly driven north by pressure from other tribes, like the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, who were being gradually pushed west, out of Minnesota and points east, by the westward expansion of the Europeans.
      Harnois explains that they will rely on experience and research to identify the materials they find.
      “It is a combination of archaeological reports and institutional documents,” he says. “It involves a lot of digging and reading.” (He notes that Don Lemur’s Middle Missouri Archaeology is probably the seminal work relating to this area and time - required reading for work “on the trench” (along the Missouri).
     
      All artifacts and materials found are processed according to federal curation standards, and curated at the South Dakota State Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City as property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
      Any inadvertent discovery of human remains will be handled according to Native American Grave Protection and Recovery Act guidelines. Excavation will be halted, tribal officials will be contacted immediately, and disposition of the remains will be completed according to USACE policy.
     
      Sharon Weber of Chamberlain began participating in the digs in 1992 - site project number 39BR13, she recalls - pointing to a dig area across the Missouri. river (in Brule Bottom) from the Corps shoreline they were occupying every day last week. With a little help from the professionals, she notes that the 1992 dig was pre-Arikara earth lodges, “initial and post-contact coalescent (the joining of two different groups of people).”
      “’Plains village peoples,’ is the term used for all groups whose history lies buried along the Missouri River.
      She points out another repeat volunteer, a man named Lynn Engel, from Blaire, Neb. Engel, a high school English teacher, wanted to do a writing project on archaeology with his students, and came on a dig to get some firsthand experience. This is his ninth dig since he began.
     
      The written history of the area begins with the establishment of the French Missouri Company, a.k.a. Bernard Pratte & Company in 1822. The post became affiliated with the American Fur Company in 1827, and was probably abandoned in favor of Fort Tecumseh that same year. It is likely that more than one fur trader set up here in competition with the American Fur Company. In 1831, an Indian Agency post was established. The military occupied the bottomland in 1855-56 during a period of transition from Fort Pierre Chouteau (upstream) to Fort Randall (downstream).
      Next year’s project will probably be the Molstad Village, Harnois says, which is a site located a mile south of the Standing Rock/Cheyenne River boundary, about 20 miles south of Mobridge as the crow flies. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe will “do the dig” of this fortified earth lodge village with the help of Corps. There too, some of the site is beginning to slough off. There, too, there is some hope that the site may be eligible for the protection afforded by listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
      Ray Pysarsky has been an archaeologist with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe for three years. He explains, “We are trying to get all the information we can now, because, five years from now, this will all be in Omaha [i.e., the river bank will have washed downstream].”
      In conflict to the race with time that may be the stressful element of archaeologists’ work is a meticulous effort to preserve the integrity of archaeological sites. Those who are smokers, take their cigarette butts away with them (in their pockets) at the end of the day. Pysarsky quotes John Muir. “Leave nothing but footprints; take nothing but memories.”
     
      Dawnita Knight-Duchover has worked for two months as a tribal archaeologist for CRST. Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Standing Rock, and Cheyenne River tribes are setting up their own THPOs (Tribal Cultural Preservation Offices), their own cultural resource programs, but so far only Standing Rock and Cheyenne River have assumed the responsibilities of their own THPOs, Dawnita says. Theirs has been up and running since November.
      Members of the CRST were involved as part of a training exercise. Tom Traversie is a paraprofessional archaeologist from Cheyenne River. There are three levels of training, and he is on his way to the third level, according to Sandy Barnum, Corps engineer.
      The supervisory staff consists this year of 10 people - five of whom are Corps, and five of whom are tribal members and others who sign on every year for these projects.
     
      That Wednesday, one of the three main groups dug into a veritable pile of artifacts - many bone tools, including a buffalo scapula used for digging - as well as remains of all the creatures the inhabitants had been eating, and several serious shards of pottery.
      It is a moment of intense excitement, according to all participants, and Ray Pyzarsky does what others jokingly call his Point Dance and Rim Shard Dance. The latter refers to finding a good rim of pottery, while the former refers to the discovery of a projectile, such as an arrowhead, knife or spear.
      By mid-week, according to Harnois, they were thinking the evidence indicated two separate occupations - one in 900 A.D. (Initial Middle Missouri), and one in 1,400 A.D. - both ancestral to the Mandans and Arikara.
      Harnois explains that you can usually identify the period and source of a piece of pottery by the shape and decorations. (He notes that carbon-dating is too expensive to be practical in this kind of situation.) All cultures go through phases and styles visible in their cultural artifacts.
      They also designate two components of the site as historic and prehistoric. The Fort Lookout II component (historic) represents the variety of fur trade activities going on in this area, the Sioux Indian Agency, and a military occupation in the mid-1850s (a transitional post in the move from Fort Pierre Chouteau to Fort Randall).
     
      Perhaps the major factor in site selection is the determination of how endangered the site happens to be. The sloughing of the bank may suggest that a particular site may be washed away by the next high water, for example.
      Along with the precariousness of the site’s survival prospects, logistics are also part of the considerations. The site needs to be considered valuable, but the area also has to be reasonably accessible, and medical assistance has to be within a few miles, even though all the supervisorial staff is trained in CPR and First Aid.
      How are the sites discovered in the first place? In this case, the site was designated 39LM57/Fort Lookout II by the Smithsonian Institute’s River Basin Survey in the 1940s. Significant sites along the river were discovered by land survey and by aerial photos from the late 1930s. The aerial photographs reveal circular or square vegetation variations where human beings once were.
      “You can see circular changes in vegetation you can identify as earth lodges,” Harnois says. “Forts are the same, only you see a square outline from the remains of the palisade.”
     
      “This is the kit,” Harnois says, pointing to two large tents and a trailer.
      This is his fifth dig. He signed on with the Corps in 1995, and has also been working on the Fort Pierre Chouteau for three years, as well as several other joint efforts with the State of South Dakota.
      “Fort Galpin was the transitional fur trade post between the Fort Pierre Chouteau and the Fort Pierre II,” he says. “Galpin was the last booshway for the Fort Pierre Chouteau when it was sold to the Army in the mid-1850s…. Chouteau was the head of the Missouri River Oufit of the American Fur Company,” Harnois says.
     
      About the changes that will take place when the Missouri River Mitigation Bill takes effect, Harnois is reluctant to say very much. “The way it is written,” he says, “it sounds like all these properties and cultural sites will be turned over to the state. It will be a big responsibility for the state.”
     
      The people who “do the digs” are “one big family” themselves, according to project engineer Rick Harnois, who presented a mountain bike to his wife Raquel (purchased surreptitiously in Chamberlain) in honor of their ninth anniversary, which fell on Thursday. The rest of the diggers promised to give them a little extra space that night, and the following day.
     
      Bart and Pat Blum were frequent visitors, grilling burgers for lunch one time, and bringing coffee and cinnamon rolls another time.
      Avery Thompson, nephew to another neighbor in the Bottom, Clarence Thompson, participated.
      Lower Brule PR director Scott Jones and four other LBST members received some training in the dig.
      Young Ryan Carman, of Boise, Idaho, was there digging with his grandmother, Betty Carman.
      Bob Vogel, who farmed 10 miles northeast of Kimball for about 74 years, is a long-time volunteer, who has been a collector of guns and Indian artifacts most of his life.
      [Note: It is illegal to remove artifacts from federal and state lands. It is actually illegal to remove anything from federal lands, and usually a felony if the objects removed have archaeological value.]
      Omaha Corps photographer Harry Weddington chronicled the dig and its finds.
     
      The Corps’ purpose with these projects, according to Harnois, is two-fold - the most important being public education. “We want to let people know what archaeology is all about,” he said, “and we also want to teach them that it’s wrong to loot these sites, to start their own collections. It is morally wrong to deprive the rest of mankind of this valuable information.”
      The second part of their purpose is the salvage and protection of the sites. “It was common practice 20-30 years ago for people to go out hunting on federal land. Nowadays, we issue citations to people caught looting.”
      “A critical thing,” Rose Fosha adds, “is what the public gives back to the scientific community, to their state, and to the field of archaeology with this volunteer work.”
      “Which is a lot of fun, after all,” Pysarsky adds.
      Fosha is one of around 10 field archaeologist/researchers based at the State Archaeological Research Center (SARC) in Rapid City. SARC is a repository for state finds, and also an approved curation facility for the Corps. Collections are kept there for scholarly purposes. She reminds the would-be archaeologists in her audience that only 10 percent is digging in the open air. “What comes after that is most important - the procedures of cleaning, sorting, cataloguing, analyzing, and formal writing,” she says, emphasizing how much of that work is done by volunteers.
      Her husband Mike Fosha is an assistant state archaeologist (Jim Haug, Rapid City, is the state archaeologist).
      Sandy Barnum is a staff archaeologist out of the Corps Omaha office - she has part of the responsibility for South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado.
      Barnum explains that the National Historic Preservation Act mandates that federal agencies do their best to preserve and protect cultural heritage. “Anyone who has anything to do with the land - the Corps, the Bureau of Land Management, the Park Service - is bound by this responsibility,” she says.
      She notes that the Corps is the only one of these agencies that doesn’t have arrest authority on land. Usually the FBI issues citations for violations on Corps-managed lands. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 makes violations of sites a possible felony.
      She says the digs are just one of the services the Corps provides in its management of the lands along the river. She notes that only government can protect the sites. However, she adds, referring to the Arikara, and even Lakota sites: “It’s hard to watch people digging up your heritage.”
     
      Among the weirdest things that the crews have dug up was this object of rusty metal and brass found in the east wall of Fort Pierre Chouteau that Rose Fosha managed to identify as a fleam - the medical instrument used to bleed people.
      Meditating on the definition of artifact (“anything made, used, or altered by man”), one observer came up with this idea: “So, then, the world is the ultimate artifact.”
     
     

Paul Daly, Fort Thompson rancher
By Bruce Hope 1999

     “If the casino had been here 40 years ago, I’d probably be broke today,” Paul Daly says only half-jokingly. “Instead I gambled at farming and ranching.”
      Daly’s ranch begins just a half mile north and one mile west from the Lodestar Casino in Fort Thompson.
      Daly came from Haakon County originally - Ottumwa to be precise - where his father had ranched. One brother, Mickey, still farms and ranches there.
      Paul first began to acquire land at age 19 in Powell, S.D. “This old boy came up to me and said ‘I want to sell you my place,’” Paul says.
      “I said ‘Hell, I ain’t got no money.’”
      “He said, ‘You just sold your cows didn’t you?’”
      Paul had bid and bought about 60 head at age 18, and now he had $2,100 from those cows. The old timer made a deal with Paul allowing him to buy a section of land for $1,000 down and $1,000 a year for the next five years.
      Daly had really started into the livestock business for himself several years earlier. At age 14, he skipped school one day and hitch-hiked to Rapid City where he went to a sale barn and made the high bids on seven calves. He didn’t have any money or checking account but paid with a counter check ($490). When he got back home, he told the banker what he’d done. The banker said that he would loan Paul the money if his dad would cosign. He also made a deal with Paul that if he paid off the loan, he’d lend him twice as much the next time.
      “I finally made a liar out of him, but he kept that up for about 14 years,” Paul says.
      When Paul was 27, he told the banker he was “a big boy now,” and wasn’t going to get his father’s signature for the loan. And besides, he said, the Murdo bank was offering money at 6 percent instead of 6 1/2. The banker warned him, “You can’t ride two horses.”
      “But,” Paul replied, “I wouldn’t want you to know that I rode the one that eats the most hay.” And he switched to the Okaton State Bank.
      After 1976, Daly would never have to borrow money again.
      Daly had two quarters himself when he inherited three quarters of his father’s ranch in 1971, and then he bought the other three quarters from his brother, making a total of 1,200 acres. In those days, he drove the same tractor back and forth between the two places, Ottumwa and Fort Thompson - 120 miles one way, a nine-and-a-half-hour drive at least six times a year. “Back then, everything was summer fallow,” he explains.
      Daly got stopped along the way a couple of times between 1966 and 1976, and ended up going before a judge for what normally would have been a wide load. But since he wasn’t custom farming, he was within his rights to travel between places - so long as he was hauling feed to his own cattle and not selling anything - and so the charges were dismissed.
      He eventually sold the place in Ottumwa sold for $314/acre. He got just what he asked for - $75,000 down and $30,000 a year for 20 years.
      Paul married Mary Hall, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, in 1958. She acquired a land allocation in 1966, which amounted a bunch of unfenced, undeveloped land north of Fort Thompson. (Allocation is a BIA rule by which tribal land can be allocated if approved by the tribal council, but it must be worked by that person who allocates it. The allocation is a non-competitive lease that requires that the lessee be a member of that reservation, and the only way you can lose the allocation is to overstock the land, or not pay your lease.)
     
      “Until AIM came along,” Paul says, “Indians could only have a limit of 250 head of cattle. After that, the Indian could have the same as the white man.”
     
      They were audited in 1972, and it was ruled that Mary Hall Daly was ruled largely exempt from federal income tax because she owned allocated land. The Dalys got money back for three years previous.
      At that time, a New Mexico cattle company owned the Geppert Ranch, one of the largest in the country, with 15,200 acres deeded, and 20,000 acres Indian land. “That first go-round, I took 2,500 (through allocation) - I just wanted a place to summer 250 head,” he says. “never did figure on moving down here. Of course he didn’t think he’d be in litigation for three-and-a half-years either.”
      Paul had many disagreements over the next three-and-a-half years with a man named Don Fleming, who was 10 percent owner, and manager of the adjacent Geppert Ranch to the north. Daly would build over 15 miles of fencein that period of time, but Fleming refused to build any. Fleming once said, “I won’t fence until a federal judge tells me I have to.”
      The protracted conflict and litigation finally culminated in a court proceeding around 1970.
      After hearing the case, the judge said, “Gentlemen, I’m going to leave the courtroom. You [Fleming] will build 15 miles of fence. When I return, I will expect both parties to have discussed how long would be a reasonable time to build that fence.”
      When the judge returned, the judge asked Daly how the discussion went. Daly replied, “Nobody’s talked to me since you left the room.”
      “Is that true?” the judge asked the other party.
      “Yes,” they admitted.
      “Then it is my order that you will build that fence in 10 days,” the judge said. “And furthermore, each of you [Fleming, and the two owners] will be fined $10,000.”
     
      Ted Jennings later bought the Geppert Ranch and he would trade use of several thousand acres of ground with Daly over the next few years. (There was deeded land interspersed with tribal allotted land, so the trading of use made things easier for everyone.)
      Paul and Mary would buy a couple of other places before they were done - the Franky Cable place, and the Johnnie Knippling place (where his son John now farms).
     
      Paul’s wife Mary (Hall) was one of nine Hall children, which included Danny, Frank, Scott, Rod, Cedrich, Hazel, Annabel and June. She died in 1992.
      “She had never been to a doctor but two times in her life,” Paul says. “She had a bad headache one day. She was OK the next morning until about 11 a.m. She was serving coffee to Ron Weber and a neighbor. I’d gone to Platte for pick up seed corn. She poured the coffee, and then said ‘I can’t get my breath, would you help me?’ They helped her for two steps and she went down.”
      Fort Thompson medics took her to Chamberlain, and she was flown by helicopter to Sioux Falls, where she was kept on life support for four days. Paul believes that they kept her on life support because her license indicated that she was an limb and organ donor.
      “A doctor later told me that she was probably dead from the aneurism before she got to the porch. The right side of her head was full of blood, the left side was full of blood, the back and the front were full of blood. He said that if just one of those parts of the brain was full of blood, she would only have a five to 10 percent chance of living, and that there would be considerable damage.”
     
      Son John does all the farming in the family - they have 5,000 acres of farm ground (and he rents some other as well) on which they rotate spring wheat, winter wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers.
      Paul is still running quite a few head of cattle. This year they bred several hundred cows. He thinks they have over a thousand calving. The hired man has some livestock as well. They started the heifers Feb. 20 - they’re probably four-fifths done. “The cows are just getting going,” he adds. “We will probably get 40-50 calves a day from the old cows.”
      At first, Daly thought the neighbor’s bull may have gotten into the herd, but he noticed that some of the early calves were Hereford, and Paul’s was the only Hereford bull around. “We weren’t supposed to start until the 25th,” he says, “but they all started early this year.”
      “We’re still feeding yearlings,” he adds, “and the last of the 1997 calves are out at Yeaton’s [feedlot]. They may have sold today.”
      Daly’s experience in the late 70s-early 80s turned him off to marketing corn. He started doing some irrigating, and had to deliver corn to Plankinton in compliance with his contract for CDPs (crop deficiency payments). After hauling the corn, the hired man said something about dockage, but Daly was busy and didn’t think much of it at first. He eventually found out that the corn buyer had been writing down a 67 percent dockage from the irrigated. Daly called to complain, and the buyer said the corn was cracked. Daly told him that he’d come and pick it up if that’s all they were going to give him for it. That won’t be possible, the man explained, because we mixed it in with other corn.
      “That was the last time I took any corn to town,” Daly says.
      He admits that there would have been damage to the corn. “I had been a wheat farmer, so I had a wheat combine - you combine wheat at 1,100 rpms, and corn at 600 rpms. You needed to buy $500 worth of equipment, and spend about a day and a half switching it over, and I hadn’t done that. So it was a mistake to do corn with a wheat combine.”
      “Today, you just buy a corn machine,” he says. “It’s easy to change the corn to wheat, but harder the other way around.”
      Daly believes that trading equipment is much cheaper than keeping the old. He started out with a $7,000 John Deere 4020 in 1970 (“Now they’re probably worth a little more than that,” he says). The next one cost $15,000, but he got $7,000 trade-in. The next one cost $35,000, but he got $15,000 trade-in.
      “Basically I got to use them all this time for nothing,” he says. “A lot of guys just getting started think they’re saving by not trading. They end up with something not worth anything.”
     
     
      Besides his brother Mickey, who ranches/farms in the Midland area, Paul also has a brother who is a retired longshoreman (at $60.05 per hour, Paul notes approvingly), and a sister Doris, a widow and grandmother living in Sumner, Wash.
      Paul and Mary had two children: John, who farms 12 miles southeast of Paul (one mile from Crow Creek), and Julie, who is currently selling out her business in Chamberlain, and who will be moving to Sioux Falls. Julie and Bob just had a daughter - Ashley Marie VanMatre. John and Shannon have sons Mason, 6, and Lucas, 4, and are expecting a third child.
     
      Son John really took to the farming, Paul says. He started in the seventh grade.
      Julie is another story. She took care of all the summer fallowing for several years, and Paul says she was very good help. “She never had a breakdown caused by her mistake. She always followed instructions very well,” he says. Julie corrects her father, noting that she did wipe out half a fence one time.
      Her heart was never into farming, she said, noting that she never learned much of anything in all those years. She describes a day when the “old beater” (Case 930) quit running. She was thinking, “Oh, good, I get to go home and watch soaps with Mom.” But, much to her chagrin, her father came along and cranked the old tractor till it started.
      Then there came a time in high school when her father said, “If you get on the honor roll, you’ll never have to get on a tractor again.” That’s semester marked the end of Julie’s career in agriculture.
     
      About the future of ranching and farming, Daly says, “A guy should know better than to say, but, for me, well, everything just keeps getting better.”
      “They [cattle] ain’t no good now,” he says, “and if they got better, they still wouldn’t be any good.”
      “But if you take care of them, it’ll keep you busy and out of trouble.”
      Daly says he’ll probably start cutting back in the near future.
      “The help is what really made things work,” he says, “and they’re getting older too. I don’t think I’m going to hire any more help.”
     
      Paul’s daughter Julie was living with her husband Bob in Sioux Falls until last year when they came to Chamberlain and she opened up the Curiosity Shoppe downtown. Bob, who worked at Don’s Ford while they were here, has been offered a job in Sioux Falls, and they’ve decided to move back.
      Bob tried farming for a few months, but “it didn’t take.”
      And Julie says, “I could never live out there [on the ranch] again. I’ve gotten too used to the conveniences.”
      Paul says, “And I couldn’t live anywhere else.”
      Julie adds, “I should never say ‘never,’ but you do get spoiled.”
     
     
      Gabriel Pomani worked for Daly from age 14 until he was 24, and was one of a line of good help that Daly credits with much of his success. Daly tried to encourage the young man to save a little money, and start a herd of his own. “Gabnel, you’ve got to start getting some cows,” Paul said. Paul suggested that he take a calf a month for wages.
      “Those cows are your problem,” Gabriel responded. “I don’t have any problems.”
      “As far as I’m concerned,” Daly says, “the big end of my success has been from good help. My dad would never hire a guy.”
     
      Note: Paul Daly passed away in 2001.
     

R-CALF working for ranchers
By Bruce Hope 1998

     Leo McDonnell, chairman of R-CALF (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Foundation), was the featured speaker at the South Dakota Stockgrowers Fall Quarterly last Sunday at Cedar Shore Resort in Oacoma. McDonnell was introduced by Bart Blum, Stockgrowers president, who thanked him for all the time and effort he has put in on behalf of the 1.2 million cattle businesses in the country.
      R-CALF is a grassroots movement trying to stem the tide of imported cattle and beef which has increasingly undermined the profitability of the cattle business in the U.S., primarily through unfair trade practices of dumping (selling products into a neighboring country at less than the cost of production) and countervailing (subsidizing - the Canadians have 103 ag subsidies).
      McDonnell introduced his wife Sam, and noted that South Dakota has come to feel like a second home (they are located in Columbus, Mont.). He said that the R-CALF movement “would not be where it is without the push that has come out of South Dakota.”
      McDonnell said, “It’s been amazing, considering we just started 8-10 weeks ago ... and you are all so distrusting and independent. I thought it’d be hard getting people to kick money in. But we’re already at the half-million dollar mark.”
      He noted the skepticism, but also the eternal optimism of people in the ag businesses. Quoting a typical farmer/rancher, he said, “Yea, my wife and I started this business with nothin’ back in 1952. This industry’s been good to us. We still have half of it left.”
      R-CALF is looking to raise $1.7 million for the first three petitions. The first is an anti-dumping suit against Canada. McDonnell told the group that good trade laws were on the books: “But to affect these laws, you’ve got to step up to the plate and make the request. The Department of Commerce won’t initiate their own investigation. The Farm Bureau says we shouldn’t have to fight it - we should let the politicians do it, but I think that’s the worst thing we can do. We’d get 10 percent of what we’ve got coming, and then only for a year.”
      He assured the ranchers that this was not a lawsuit - something that would drag on for years. “Most of these cases are acted on within 8-12 months. It is a mandated timetable. When the International Trade Commission (ITC) rules, it goes into effect immediately ... otherwise I probably wouldn’t be standing here today.”
      [Janklow spoke at a recent Republican rally in Chamberlain. When a local banker asked about the R-CALF movement, Janklow didn’t answer directly, but said that if this was such a good case, lawyers would be falling all over each other to take it on contingency. The reality is, according to McDonnell, that this is a petition and not a lawsuit. When it’s over, there may or may not be policy change, but there won’t be any fat paychecks for lawyers, i.e., no contingency.]
      “Folks, we’re being attacked today. “We have to go in unified - at one time - set aside our differences long enough to get this done,” he said.
      According to the available research, U.S. cattlemen have lost over 25 percent of their value from imports. “Just the imports from Canada cost us 3-4 percent,” McDonnell says, “which they say is 100 percent of our profit margin. I’d say that’s pretty significant.”
      “Using their formula - they say that in 1995, 1.8 billion pounds of exports improved the value of our calves $96.80,” he said. “So, isn’t it fair to ask what impact 4.5 billion pounds of imports will have. We figure it’s costing us around $200 a head.”
      “Most of you have been around long enough to know that we’re not in a normal cattle cycle. Some bankers, some senators have told you it’s only beef production. But U.S. beef production figures include all live imports (1-7 percent)! Isn’t that something. They’ve been masking imports by calling them U.S. production, and then telling us we’re over-producing.”
      McDonnell said that the U.S. is importing up to 18 percent, and this year will be weaning the smallest calf crop since 1951.
      He explained that he had asked the USDA for all of their import/export data for the last 15 years, and when he got the info, he noticed there was no import data on poultry. When he inquired about this, he received a written reply which stated the U.S. imports such an insignificant amount of poultry, that they don’t even mention it - “and this next sentence is what really got me,” McDonnell said - “because the U.S. has such strong trade barriers to protect domestic production.”
      The sheep industry has gone the opposite route, from 45 million head to 20 million in 1980, to 9.5 million in 1986 and finally to 7.6 million in 1998. Imports have gone from 10 percent in 1980 to as high as 40 percent this spring.
      The poultry industry has a strategy, an agenda, McDonnell says. “I’m hoping that when we win the first go-rounds, we can continue to build on R-CALF.”
      One alternative to this petition process is to file what is called a Section 201 with the federal government. However, McDonnell says, of the 60 filed last year, only 30 got affirmative judgements and then they still have to go through the executive branch where only 10 were acted on. This is a short-term remedy for a long term problem. “It’s kind of like wetting your pants when it’s cold out. It warms you up for a while, but then it turns cold again, and you’re also wet.”
      McDonnell suggested interested people go to the library or internet and call up the March 28 issue of The Wall Street Journal to get a really good story about why the steel industry takes a similar route to fair treatment. Successful petitions were lodged by the tomato industry, the wheat gluten industry, steel industry, etc. In fact, one of the stockgrowers, who is also a honey producer (Dakota Blossom), was part of a successful honey producer’s action against dumping by the Chinese. He said it cost around $500,000, and didn’t solve all of their problems, but did cause a substantial rise in prices for a couple of years. Eventually China took other markets - used NAFTA to get through Mexico and Canada.
      R-CALF’s dumping suit is against Canada, who supplies half of the total imports to the U.S. “Our purpose is to monitor trade and file import relief actions for the cattle industry. We have one issue, and it’s important to stay focused. “We could put enough trade restrictions on them to price them out of the market.” McDonnell quotes a letter from a Canadian legislator saying “there can be no doubt that when they take action, it will be Alberta who will suffer, despite NAFTA.” In other words, they are aware that they are in violation of trade laws. In fact, they promised three years ago not to do this very thing, according to McDonnell.
      Cattle production in Canada has increased 285 percent in the last 45 years. It is the two big packers in Canada - Cargill and IBP - who kill 66 percent of the cattle slaughtered, and stand to lose a few billion dollars a year if this petition is successful.
      (McDonnell noted also that it looks like they have a strong case against Mexico as well.)
      A cattleman in the audience noted in answer to a question that most of the sale barns in the Black Hills were now advertising that they will withhold a voluntary check-off from livestock sales for R-CALF. Some people are donating calves, horses, etc.
      “In Philip, they’re donating one or two critters a week,” the rancher said.
      McDonnell urged his audience to call up their Farm Bureau representatives and tell them “either sign on or we’re going to start pulling our insurance. Too tough? I don’t think so.” McDonnell can’t quite figure out why the Farm Bureau hasn’t signed onto this idea yet. “I don’t know what their problem is. They started this nonsense that we could be counter-sued (this has never happened). They’ve come out with a lot of nonsense.
      “They say we have a 40 percent chance of winning. Well, I don’t know what our chance of winning is, but I know that the alternative - which is to do nothing - is no option at all.
      He said, “You stockgrowers might want to get a campaign going too. “I know you don’t have anything else to do,” he added in jest.
      R-CALF has hired a prestigious and very specialized Washington law firm to pursue the case. They have to prove unfair trade practices (dumping, countervailing) and injury. “We won’t have any problem proving injury,” McDonnell says. They also need a mandate from 25 percent of the business. McDonnell says they’re already up to that, but want to go into the fray with 50 percent signed on.
      R-CALF started out with four directors, and has added three executive directors and hired a secretary. The money is handled by an accounting firm in Billings. The secretary is paid, but no one else has taken money in wages. Recently it was decided that directors would receive partial travel expense money.
     
      by Bruce Benham, editor
      “Considering all the work being done in the fields, it’s a very nice crowd we have here tonight,” said Johnny Smith, beginning his speech to cattlemen, bankers, businessmen, and other interested parties who gathered at the sale barn (Chamberlain Livestock Auction) Monday night to learn more about R-CALF, a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to initiate action to have U.S. trade regulations enforced, especially where cattle are concerned.
      Smith, who was pinch-hitting for R-CALF spokesman Leo McDonnell, explained: “Concentration and collusion have taken our market away. The beef industry people keep coming up empty-handed in Washington.” Jerry Biedenfeld, a Fort Pierre consultant, accompanied Smith at the podium, and spoke briefly on a couple occasions.
      “The best cattle in the world come right out of this area, and we get the same price as the rodeo cattle down south,” Smith said. “Is that fair?” Smith explained that subsidies to help exporters don’t help the rancher. Fast track, NAFTA - Smith is not thrilled with the combination. “So the President can make decisions without going through Congress. When has he made a good decision? There are six South American countries lined up to come in. We are importing cattle from Australia at 40 cents/pound. How will you like 20 cents a pound?” he asks.
      “The main thing,” Smith explains, “is to slow down imports.”
      “To give you an idea of what we’re up against,” Smith describes the three companies controlling everything. Iowa Beef Processing (IBP) has 42 percent of all the fat cattle killed, most of the hogs, and 40 percent of all cows. ConAgra kills 21 percent of all the fat cattle, monopolizes much of the chemical/fertilizer production, and has offices in 28 countries. Some supermarket names owned by ConAgra: Swift Butterball, Hunt’s, Peter Pan, Van Camps, Country Skillet, and Orville Redenbacher ... Country General stores. They are the second largest food producer in the world. Finally, Cargill is in 70 countries and is third in beef, pork, and feedlot industries.
      About the obvious monopolies, Smith says “The anti-trust people should be sued for dereliction of duty, and then fired.”
      R-CALF has raised around $400,000 so far, and needs another $350,000 for the first phase, Smith says. There are 1.2 million cattle producers in the country, and 25 percent of them are needed to sign the import relief petition. Smith said the National Farmers’ Union just got on board, so that brings potentially 340,000 signatures, but Smith believes that even more signatures will better get lawmakers’ attention.
      Smith was talking with Governor Janklow recently, and he said he appreciated what the governor had tried to do with the Canadians, but Janklow repeated the argument against R-CALF that, if this was such a good lawsuit, lawyers would take it on contingency. “But this isn’t a lawsuit,” Smith said. “This is a petition.”
      “We’re gaining more in standing every day,” Smith said. “The lawfirm of Stewart and Stewart have taken the case. They are the best-known lawyers in Washington for filing petitions. That’s all they’ve been doing since 1954. Wheat gluten, crawfish, strawberries ... even Harley Davidson. Three years ago cheap tomatoes were being dumped on the market by the Mexicans. Those who were still in business filed a petition against the dumping. The resulting study determined that production costs should make them $5.17 a box. Mexicans were selling for $3 a box. They required the Mexicans to pay the difference up to the break-even point. Now, tomatoes are not only back up to $5.17/box, but they have actually come up 130 percent from there.
      “What we’re talking about is trade laws,” Smith said. “They’ve just never been enforced.”
      Cattle is a $33 billion industry - the largest segment of American agriculture. In 1996, it was a loss of $141/head in cow-calf operation, and it will be worse in 1998. Smith explained that estimates are in the range of $200/head loss to the U.S. cattleman.
      “Free trade should not mean that you’re free to do whatever you want to whoever you want,” Smith says.
      “They keep telling you that you’ve overproduced - so why do we need any imported cattle?” he asked. “The newspapers, the bankers tell us that we’ve overproduced. Baloney! We’re over-importing. We’re importing twice what we export. We have no poultry imports because of strong U.S. trade. We export three times as much poultry as beef. And peanuts are healthy - thank you, Jimmy Carter.
      “A few years ago, we were exporting 45 million sheep. Then it was 20 million. Last year, 7.6 million. We’ve lost two-thirds of an industry!” The same thing may happen to beef, he warns.
      “Trade between nations should be mutually beneficial. In 1997 alone, there were 1.4 billion pounds of beef trade deficit with Canada.
      Live cattle imports have increased nearly 600 percent in the last 10 years.
      The Canadian cattle industry is financed at 3.75 percent. There are 103 grain subsidies (20-25 major ones).
      “If demand is so poor, why are beef imports already up 20 percent in the first quarter? Australia expects to export another two million pounds - this will raise our imports another 8 percent.
      “They tell you this is a normal cattle cycle. There is nothing normal about this cycle!” At this time, Smith and Biedenfeld went to the overhead projector to show a graph which tracked live fed prices along with choice retail price. The two jagged lines on the graph run neck-and-neck until 1994 when live fed prices plummet. Biedenfeld explained that the top-end of the retail price (the white cloth restaurant beef) is not reflected in this choice retail price, which means that the two lines of the graph should in fact be even more divergent than they are. In other words, the price paid to the rancher took a very serious dive in relation to the price paid by consumers.
      Smith explained that through NAFTA, we’ve lost our tariffs and our quotas. “Five years of NAFTA - how many of you are better off?” he asked.
      “Don’t forget that anything that comes across these borders becomes U.S. production. Then you get blamed for overproduction.
      “The USDA has reported that the trend of rising imports will continue.
      “We’re seeing the fewest calves produced this year since 1951.”
      “Tonight I found out about a little situation down in Mexico. There were 5,260 Australian cattle about to come in at 40 cents a pound. At 60-70 cents a pound, we’re going broke in this country. Mexican ranchers didn’t want the cattle coming in. Between 10 Mexican states and four U.S. states, a letter was written to Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman. We haven’t heard from him. Daschle and Johnson said they were looking into whose name was on the permit. Since then, the permit’s changed twice. Can’t get anybody to take responsibility. Found out tonight that two more loads are on their way to Mexico from Australia - 30-40,000 cattle will be imported.
      Smith says American ranchers need mandatory price-reporting and labeling. “If you could label yours “American Hamburger” it would double your price. The benefit to not labelling beef goes to the packers. A plum has a label - say ‘California 2037’ - you can tell where it came from. Pick up a steak, and you have no idea.”
      “Nobody’s seen prices this bad since the depression ... but the difference between now and then is that nothing cost anything then. It’s actually worse now.”
      “All we’re asking is that trade laws and anti-trust laws be enforced. Which one of you would fix the tires on your loader if the engine didn’t work? Let’s fix the motor - the market - first before we fix the tires.
      “Competition increases efficiency and production; concentration suppresses it.”
      In 1987, the U.S. imported 262,000 head from Canada - and exported 33,000 to Canada. In 1997, we imported 1,377,000 and exported only 41,000. “We consume over 50 percent of Canada’s production - and these cattle are called ‘U.S. production’ once they cross the border!”
      Smith warned not to get to thinking that Canadians were to blame, however. “The Canadians and the Mexicans are going broke, too,” he exclaimed. “IBP kills 66 percent of the cattle in Canada.”
      The 1.2 million cattle producers would be the largest case ever heard by the National Trade Commission, according to Smith. “I really believe this is a chance - maybe the only chance - for cattlemen to do something for themselves.”
      “We’ve had donations from $5 to $5,000. The biggest came from the South Dakota Beef Industry Council who donated the $21,000 they had saved for a rainy day since the 80s. Some are giving a voluntary check-off at the sale barns of $1/head for R-CALF.
      “When the young people are gone, so is the industry,” Smith warned. “Right now, what I’d advise young people to do is go to college and become antitrust lawyers! There is going to be such a strong movement in that direction that it will make Teddy Roosevelt look like a piker!”
      Jerry Biedenfeld bolstered Smith’s plea for ranchers to help themselves by contributing to R-CALF by telling a few stories of his own. He also echoed Smith’s disdain of the National Cattle Beef Association (NCBA), who have consistently opposed investigations of packer concentration, and yet are supposedly serving the cattleman.
      In the question and comment period following, one local rancher disagreed with Smith’s negative assessment of the NCBA, but agreed with most everything else that was said, as did nearly every one who commented. Harold Meyerink of Platte said: “So many organizations, so many different causes - we can’t seem to get the common producers together on a cause. I can’t see why anyone would oppose R-CALF.”
      One astute young rancher warned that once R-CALF reaches a certain degree of significance and strength, and once the big corporations feel a little bit of pressure, “you’re going to see a bump in the market. They’re playing a game here, and so all they have to do is raise prices a few dollars and everybody goes home.”
      “I know times are tough,” Smith said, “but we have a very good chance of getting something done here.”
     
      The U.S. Department of Commerce has decided to initiate investigations in response to all three petitions filed by R-CALF and supporters against unfair importing rules with Canada and Mexico.
      According to Leo McDonnell, Jr., Columbus, Mont., rancher, and president of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Foundation, the decision was a critical first step in restoring fair trade to the nation’s cattle industry. The three cases initiated by the Commerce Department are: 1) an anti-dumping investigation on imports of live cattle from Canada; 2) a countervailing duty investigation on imports of live cattle from Canada; and 3) an anti-dumping investigation on imports of live cattle from Mexico. In some cases, the dumping margins were as high as 100 percent. (Dumping refers to instances of the prices being higher in Canada than the prices for exporting to the U.S., or cases where the export prices are lower than the full cost of production.) They will also investigate the subsidies given producers by the Canadian government. The time-line for these rulings is 140 days or less.
      The USDA has estimated that cattle prices have been below viable costs of production for several years, and that thousands of ranchers will be lost this year, causing the virtual disappearance of entire communities in rural America, according to R-CALF vice-president Kathleen Kelley, a Colorado rancher.
      Because of the broad support of R-CALF, the movement is being called a national effort, which is uniting an industry that is generally fragmented.
     

Roberta Henriksen, Vivian matriarch
By Bruce Hope 1999

     It was Roberta Henriksen’s 86th birthday last week.
      Roberta is the surviving matron of the Henriksen family, who homesteaded north of Vivian around the turn of the century.
      She is the daughter of Bob and Hattie who lived in Hudson, South Dakota. Bob was the editor of the Hudson paper, and was the town butcher. Hattie ran the town mercantile.
     
      Roberta’s father, Bob Schaber, born in 1872 in Baden, Germany, came to America when he was seven. Bob’s father and a friend both opened meat markets in Dubuque, Iowa, and eventually moved to Sioux Falls where there was more opportunity as the city was growing rapidly.
      Her mother Hattie’s family came to this country in 1627.
      Roberta tells stories of when her father was courting her mother. She had no sympathy for him. He was always showing off for her. One day he was clowing around while carrying her wash water for her and slipped and spilled water all over himself.
      “Dad danced, but she was a Methodist,” Roberta says, “and to dance or play cards was considered sinful.”
      Roberta remembers the family’s instructions clearly. “We’d play cards, but we had instructions about what to do if Hattie’s family drove up. When somebody drove up on a Sunday afternoon, we’d all be sitting there all innocent.”
      He wrote his first editorial in 1886, and went on to be the editor and publisher of the Hudson Hudsonite. In 1897, he married Hattie Waterbury and they raise four daughters: Ita, Viola, Florence, and Roberta. Hattie ran the Hudson mercantile.
      “They were the head of everything in town,” Roberta says. “If you count the dogs,” she adds, “there were about 500 people in town.”
      Bob served as state senator for several terms, in the teens and 20s, and then was the press correspondent covering the legislature for all the weekly newspapers in the state throughout the ‘30s. He was eventually inducted into the South Dakota State University Journalism Hall of Fame.
      Roberta’s favorite picture of her dad is a typical one, where he had gravy on his tie, and a generally shabby appearance. “He always had holes in his shoes, but he had a nickel for all the kids in town,” she marvels.
      The year he died, he ran again for the state senate, and got 98 percent of the vote in the county.
      Roberta’s father’s generosity was legendary. “We had chickens, and he delivered food to a lot of people in town. Some Germans squeeze things, and some are open-handed. We had a new house, and mom had the mercantile, too, but we never had any money, because he gave it all away.”
      “Poor people would come get the water we boiled the bologna in,” Roberta says.
      “And there was this family who lived on the edge of town. Everybody thought they were rich, because the man’s father, a colonel, had been well-off. Later on, the Schaber girls found out that their father had brought that family groceries all through the Depression.
      This all came out when he died, and one of the man’s daughters later gave the Schaaber family $800 to repay them for their father’s generosity. Each of the girls got $200, and Roberta remembers that money stretching a very long ways in those days.
     
      Besides running the mercantile, which was unheard of in those days, Hattie also ran the newspaper while Bob was away in the legislature. One day the WPA (Works Projects Administration) workers came to tar and feather Bob over something derogatory that had been in the paper. Bob had no idea what they were talking about. Then Hattie came out and said it was she who was responsible for the editorial, and she yelled at them to get the hell out of there, and they did.
      “When this one guy named Ole died,” Roberta says, “Mom was the only Democrat in the whole damn town. When WPA came in, everybody in town was a Democrat.”
      Hattie originally got in the mercantile with her brother, who came in one day to say that he and his wife - who had asthma - were heading west in the covered wagon.
      Roberta lost her mother in a freak accident one spring when the water was high on the Sioux River, which was 10 miles from Hudson. Hattie and the three girls took the buggy down to see the swelling river.
      The horses were frightened by the risen waters, and began to rebel against going onto the bridge. Hattie tossed the kids out in the mud, and jumped down and was going to try to hold the horses’ heads, but she couldn’t hold them. The horses backed off the bridge and crushed her under the buggy.
      “That was my mother,” Roberta says. “She had to go see that darn river.”
     
      Roberta remembers her father’s newspaper as a great place to play as a child, but she also remembers “stick type” (one word at a time) and the evolution finally to linotype. “You put hot lead in it, and made one line at a time,” she said, “one column wide.”
      All of her father’s papers are preserved at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre. “People love to go back and find out family histories through the obituaries,” Roberta says.
     
      Roberta’s three sisters were accomplished women in their day, as well. Viola earned a law degree, something extremely uncommon in the 1930s. In fact, Roberta recalls her saying “I’m the smartest girl in my class.”
      After the proper pause, she added, “I’m the only girl in my class.”
      Viola served as secretary to a Supreme Court Clerk. (Hattie herself had gone to two years of Normal School, beyond high school.)
      While Ita was going to college at the University of South Dakota, she would take Roberta with her, diapers and all. Ita became a teacher and principal in Hudson schools.
      Roberta’s oldest sister, Florence, was the only Schaber who had no children.
     
      Roberta lived much of her life on the wide-open prairie north of Vivian.
      “It used to be free range out here,” Roberta reminisces. “There were no fences.”
      They faced some tough times, she remembers. “It dried out several years. It dried out a couple years in the ‘80s and we had to take cattle to Hayes one year and to Mitchell the next to winter. We didn’t have any feed.”
      “One year we had a bad winter and dad sold all the cattle, but he kept the open heifers because I insisted (this turned out to be a wise choice).”
      It was not unusual for the Henriksens to be snow-bound for a month or longer.”
      “When we lived in that old house,” Roberta said, “it was a lot of fun. We thought we had some tough times, but I don’t think we really did. Even though Grandma and Grandpa used to can Russian Thistle.”
      “We enjoyed shocking grain,” she said. “It didn’t take much to have a good time. We didn’t have any money, but nobody had any. We had a good time.”
      “Dawn [her daughter, now in Montana] had fits because she couldn’t get all the athletic options here, but I don’t think it hurt her a bit,” Roberta says. “Nowadays, kids have to have everything, and they’re not better for it.”
      They didn’t plant wheat in those days, but ran cattle and did a little general farming. Grandpa Hans always had to have his share, until they finally bought the place.
     
      The mystery of life hit home again when Roberta lost Roy five-and-a-half years ago to lung cancer. “I had everything wrong with me,” she says. “I should have been the one to go first. He didn’t drink or smoke or do anything wrong. He was just a very nice guy.”
      “I was the scamp. I did all kinds of crazy things - got my sister Florence in all kinds of trouble trying to act as young as I was. I took her horseback riding. She lost a stirrup (pummel on the polo pony saddle) and ended up landing butt-first on a yucca plant. She couldn’t eat anything for three days. I just about killed her.”
     
      Roberta’s husband Roy Henriksen was born on the Lyman County family farm north of Vivian in 1917. He and his brother Albert lived on the banks of the Bad River while going to high school in Fort Pierre. He graduated from Pierre High School in 1935. He tried out for the St. Louis Browns baseball team that summer. Roy earned a degree in accounting from Whitman College in Spokane, Wash. He worked as a surveyor and a concrete finisher.
      Roy returned home to work the ranch with his father in 1943. He married Roberta (Schaeber) in May of 1948, and they purchased the family ranch that same year.
      He died at their ranch home north of Vivian, March 6, 1993.
      Their daughter Dawn is a pharmacist in Helena, Mont., but that’s not all she is. She hikes. She’s the head of the ski patrol at Big Sky. She roller skates. She practices karate.
      “When they lived in Omaha,” Roberta continues, “she was doing carpentry. She’s got to try everything.”
      Dawn is married to “an Air Force Brat,” Scott Barnes, and they spent three years in Germany. Roberta notes that Scott is very good with flowers, painting and stained glass.”
      Daughter Dawn was back recently, helping Roberta clean out the basement and other areas in the wake of Roy’s passing. “Since my daughter’s been here, I can’t find anything,” she complains half-heartedly.
     
      Roberta’s son Jan, his wife Marta, and children Niki, Piper, and Mark, took up life on the farm a couple of years ago. Jan gave up a very successful career as an engineer to return to farming, and the place where his grandfather homesteaded. Although the children grew up in places like Seattle, Wash., and Butte, Mont., they never felt quite at home there. Now they feel like they’ve come home.
      Jan’s kids are taking to the country life, loyal in their chores, and exuberant in their play.
      Niki went out for a ride on their horse Dusty the other day. The horse began hopping a little, throwing its head around, and turning against rein towards the barn. “Niki’s not used to making a horse do what she wants it to,” Jan said.
      Jan had to take the horse for a little ride to change his attitude.
      When the children are not helping with chores, taking care of their two 4-H sheep, or using the rope swing over the hay, they may be fishing for largemouth in a nearby stock dam. The fish average about one-and-a-half to two pounds, and sometimes get up to four. The other day they fished for 15 minutes and Mark came home with 13, and Piper and Niki each had eight and nine.
      Although the Henriksen kids have moved back to the country, that doesn’t mean they’ve lost their interest in learning about the world.
      “Did you know that the cobra’s hood is acutally its ribs?,” Niki asks. “And its bite is the most venomous in the world, capablle of killing 150 people.”
      “And did you know that the eyes of an owl are two-thirds the size of its skull? And if we had hawk’s eyes, they’d be the size of oranges.
      “The owl has the strongest talons of all birds of prey, being capable of 800 pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure. And they can rotate their heads 270 degrees.”
     
      Noel is Roberta’s oldest boy with Roy. He is Jan’s older brother, and his neighbor, and he runs a cattle ranching operation on the place. Noel taught auto mechanics in Brookings, and then in Huron, before coming back to the family ranch. He also spent several years as a successful wrestling coach at Springfield.
      Noel and an associate, Sam Heikes of Fort Pierre, are undertaking to build a large agricultural complex near Fort Pierre.
      Noel and his wife Pat have four children from Pat’s previous marriage.
     
      Roberta’s son Gene (by her first marriage) lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he is a lawyer. He left law to go into computers, and has now come back to the legal profession.
      Roberta takes delight nowadays in detailing the ethnic diversity in her large family. Ita’s son Craig is a protestant who got married by a Catholic priest to a Japanese girl. One of Viola’s grandchildren married a Phillipino.
      Gene and his Norwegian wife have an African-American daughter, Kelly, who is “quite an athlete,” and works at Dayton’s in Minneapolis. “I think a lot of her,” Roberta says. “She always always has to explain those blonde parents of hers.”
      “When I die, I’ll have 50 granchildren,” Roberta marvels.
      “Ita helped them all,” Roberta says, giving her sister credit. “She paid for tuition for one, and helped another get her citizenship.”
      “It’s a mixed-up world,” she says, “but we’re all American. We’ve got ‘em all in our family, and I love them all.”
     
      Both Noel and Jan are on the Rowe Township Board. Roberta served on the board some 20 years, part of the time as the board’s clerk.
      “I had to wait for everybody to move to town before I could get off,” she says.
      Nowadays, Roberta goes regularly to town to play pitch with some of her old friends.
      In the Henriksen junk yard, a neat row of antique farm machinery and other equipment, an old horse-drawn road grader sits rusting. Now the county does all the roads, Roberta says.
      “This township grader was used on Highway 83,” Roberta says - it used to come right by here. This was before gravel, before 83 as you know it. This is ‘Old-Old 83.’ There is also ‘Old 83,’ two miles west, and then ‘New 83’ is six-tenths of a mile further west.”
      Roberta notes that the Mni Wiconi rural water project tower is going up on “Old 83.”
      “We were supposed to get this in ’81 or ’82,” she says. “How come it took so long? I don’t know.”
      In her 50-plus years on the Henriksen property, Roberta has seen the world come a ways from the days before electricity, to 32-volt batteries on the wind charger.
     

Senator Tim Johnson wins reelection by a nose
By Bruce Hope Feb 02

     Incumbent U.S. Senator Tim Johnson, D-SD, was one of the few Democrats who survived the 2002 election cycle. Challenger Congressman John Thune fell short by a few hundred votes in a race whose lead changed hands throughout the night and whose outcome was not quite certain even when Thune conceded a couple days later, because of the cloud of suspicion raised by accusations of illegal ballots being cast on the reservations. Even though these rumors turned out to be largely concocted, most observers were surprised that Thune did not ask for a recount in his 500-vote loss. Johnson rejoins fellow South Dakotan, Majority Leader Tom Daschle in the U. S. Senate where the Democratic Party has slipped from power, but where South Dakota should continue to enjoy considerable influence.

Tracy Rabern is a mountain climber
By Bruce Hope 1998

     In the middle of last winter, Tracy Rabern and her friend Kevin Jones climbed up the solid ice slopes of a large, sleeping volcano, and peered into the bottomless dark of the crater.
      It was the middle of the winter in Tracy’s hometown of Presho (or Kennebec, depending on who you ask), but it was more like summer where Rabern and Jones were ascending Mount Orizaba 70 miles east of Mexico City.
      It was not much like summer on the slopes of Mount Orizaba, however.
      Mount Orizaba has been dormant since the 1600s, although nearby Popocatépetl (Aztec for “smoking mountain”), near Mexico City, has been active for the past two years. “Popo,” just 70 miles up the mountain chain from Orizaba, has been the subject of much scrutiny, because it is only 15 miles north of Mexico City. The mountain often spits burning cinders into Mexico City, and an eruption would decimate several towns and villages in the other direction.
      Mount Orizaba has been a favorite of mountaineers - especially Americans - for a variety of reasons. The main attractions of this particular mountaineering challenge include: its location, its size, and its material consistency, as well as intangibles such as the danger/mystery of walking on a sleeping volcano.
      Climbers like the fact that it’s only an hour from the largest city in the world, and that it’s a glacier-covered mountain in the tropics. It’s a challenge to summit, but it can be done in a day. The most popular route of ascent is the north side, mostly because it gets less sunlight, making the glacier more stable.
      Rabern and Jones flew into Puebla, a city of a couple million, and then took buses and taxis out to the village of Tlachechuca, near the base of Orizaba.
      As members of a search and rescue team in the Santa Fe, N.M., area (roughly 1,200 miles north of Mexico City) Tracy and Kevin spent most of their weekends this summer training for the Orizaba climb. Although the mountains near Santa Fe only rise to something over 12,000 feet, they contain challenges and obstacles enough to make for an ideal training ground. In fact, the training process thinned out the numbers of those ready to make the Orizaba ascent. Beginning with 15 or 20, they were down to eight before the morning they began their ascent.
      The 18,800-foot summit was the highest elevation any of the mountaineering group had ever attained previously. Of the eight in the group, only six would make it all the way to the summit. (The highest point in the Rockies is only around 14,000 - Pike’s Peak and Long’s Peak are 14,400 feet.)
      Rising around 1:30 a.m., climbers typically seek to traverse the steep glacier of Orizaba before the midday sun threatens to make the ice sheets unstable. “And, theoretically, this is supposed to get you down in time to miss the afternoon storms,” Jones says. “Blizzards and sub-zero temperatures are common - the weather is very unstable in the high mountains.”
      The group spent two-and-a-half days at the base camp “acclimatizing,” or getting acclimated to the climate (yes, mountaineers have their lingo, too, Kevin says). The plan was to return to the base before mid-afternoon on the day of the climb to the summit, but in this case, Tracy and Kevin did not make their final descent until 4 p.m., because they had to assist in bringing down two people who could not finish the climb to the top. They would end up climbing most of the mountain twice that day, and carrying a good share of the sick people’s gear. Tracy was the only woman to make it to the top.
      In the mountains near Santa Fe, the group rehearsed the rescue of a fellow climber out of a crevasse; they rehearsed glacier rope travel, which “involves more intricacies than you would think,” according to Jones; and trained in techniques of “self-arrest” - i.e., how to stop yourself when you’re falling. These techniques came in handy for Jones himself, who misstepped on the hard glare of ice that day on Orizaba, stepping with the side of his boot, instead of the steel spiked “crampons” strapped to the boot bottom. Up until the point of a misstep, the climber’s “ice axe” serves primarily as a cane.
      The ice axe is shaped like an elongated hammer, which has a sharp, serrated ice pick instead of a mallet, and an ice scoop instead of a claw. When a person falls, they are trained to fall on the axe as they plunge it into the ice. As further precaution, in this group climbers were roped together in two groups of three. But Jones was able to arrest his fall in just a few feet, and so did not have to test his connection to his fellow climbers.
      Besides the ropes and the ice axes, the group utilized ice screws, or bolts, hammered and then screwed into the ice (with an ice axe) to anchor climbers. Jones explains that in some places the glacier is such a hard combination of rock and ice that the ice axes are somewhat ineffectual. The angle of the ascent, according to Jones, is 45 or 50 degrees. “It’s like a steep staircase made of ice,” he said.
     
      The reason the two others did not make it to the summit was probably a combination of altitude and inadequate training, Rabern says. “You have to have the buddy system,” Tracy says, “because at that altitude, you’re the last one to know that you’re sick. Pretty much everybody gets light-headed at these altitudes.”
      “No one is ever be allowed to descend alone, or be left alone because, as a friend of ours is fond of saying, ‘Your stupid molecules get very big.’ Your judgement is among the first things to go when there is a shortage of oxygen.”
      As the sick couple sat crying at 18,000 feet, they were at first encouraged by their fellow mountaineers. “It’s only a half hour more to the summit,” they would say. “But they would just look at you,” Tracy says. “And we knew that they were going no higher.” About half the people who attempt the climb reach the summit, Tracy says.
      Although you can’t be sure that it was the altitude that was the problem, Jones says, you learn to recognize certain symptoms, such as nausea and dizziness. “It’s tricky sometimes to know what’s going on with people, but up there you don’t have time to screw around.”
      Headaches are one of the first symptoms. The two who didn’t make the summit that day were sick and crying until they got back down to around 16,000 feet, where they began to perk up again. Oxygen at the summit of Orizaba is about one-half that of normal. The climbers will tell you that it feels pretty weird to be breathing a lot and feeling like you’re not getting much into your lungs.
      Tracy, who also recently qualified for the Boston Marathon, says that “Whereas a runner is used to so many steps per breath, in this case you’re sometimes counting breaths per step.”
      On such one-day climbs, provisions comprise about 25 pounds of weight, including food, emergency gear, fuel for Coleman camp stoves (there is no fuel on glaciers), and a lot of water. On this climb, they took one sleeping bag for each three people, to be used primarily in case of injury.
      At the summit, or the rim of the volcano, the view was pretty incredible, Tracy says. “The crater itself is so dark and steep that you can’t see the bottom. We would toss pebbles in and listen to them fall until we couldn’t hear them any longer.”
      “All I know,” Kevin says, “is that this was something you didn’t want to fall into.”
      It’s always real cold at that altitude, they say, and almost always windy. There is a point during the ascent that the groups realize there is no communicating with sound, because of the wind.
      That day was sunny and a warm 10 degrees Fahrenheit. All the clouds were below them as they looked down from the summit of the ancient volcano. In the distance they could see the smoking giant Popocatépetl
      Jones explains that mountaineering is still something people are learning how to do. The old Edmund Hillary style involved taking a huge caravan of people and massive amounts of provisions. Today, people tend toward a much lighter technique, attempting a much quicker summit and descent. Whereas they are able to summit and get down in one day at Orizaba, “When you get mountains in the neighborhood of 21-22,000, you can’t summit and get down in one day,” Jones said.
      When they climb Mt. Everest (at 29,028 feet, the highest in the world) or K2, nowadays they climb in segments of a couple thousand feet, staying a couple days or more at each site, “acclimatizing” for the next section of the climb. And nowadays, it’s only the climbers that go high, according to Rabern - “They no longer bring a whole bevy of chirpas and support crew to make the assault on the summit.”
     
      Tracy’s parents aren’t exactly thrilled about the fact that Tracy and Kevin are planning an assault on Mt. Rainier in June. When they climbed Orizaba, Tracy had called her mother to notify her they would be out of communication for a week. When the climb was over, Jan asked her daughter if she felt like she’d conquered the mountain.
      “No,” Tracy replied. “I felt like we were damned lucky to have made it safely.”
      Climbing mountains requires extreme cardio-vascular conditioning, according to Jones. “You need a lot of red blood cells to get oxygen in,” he says.
      And there are unmeasurable factors, such as a certain “gift” for mountaineering. It’s not something just anybody can do. “It’s only recently that this has been studied in a real scientific way,” Jones says.
      Mt. Rainier is the most Himalayan-type mountain in the U.S. Because it’s just off the Puget Sound, there is always moisture coming in, so there are a lot of ice towers, pinnacles, large crevasses, and sometimes avalanches. A lot of mountaineers train there.
      Tracy says, “After you climb a mountain, you are so exhausted and so happy to sit at your warm desk for a long time. Then, eventually, you get restless again.”
      “Some people play cards to relieve stress,” Jan says. “These guys climb mountains.”
     
      Tracy Rabern, daughter of Ron and Janet Rabern of Presho-Kennebec, is just beginning a career as a criminal defense attorney at the appellate level (an “eleventh-hour” attorney, she says) for the state of New Mexico in Santa Fe. She just finished a clerkship for the New Mexico Supreme Court.
      She qualified for the Boston Marathon with a run in the Duke City (Albuquerque) Marathon, but injured herself cross-country skiing and couldn’t participate.
      Kevin Jones is a technical writer for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. He writes user manuals, reports and papers on a variety of scientific subjects, doing most of his work from home. Since they are a prime contractor for the Department of Energy, he has worked on some important projects.
      They had done a lot of work with robotics, and the end of the cold war has prompted the cleaning up of nuclear sites throughout the country, and this can’t be done with human beings. The more entryways you go through, the higher the levels of radiation. So they are doing a series of reports on the process of cleaning up nuclear waste with the use of robotics. “It’s a tricky business, dismantling these laboratories from the inside out with robots,” he says.
     
      Ron and Jan Rabern also enjoyed the company of daughters Julie and Renee, and son Tom, over the holidays.
      “Mom is a great cook - she prepared dinner for 20 on Christmas,” Tracy said.
      “We’re just very happy they could all be home for Christmas,” Jan says.
      Tracy and Kevin arrived Wednesday, but their luggage didn’t get to the Pierre airport until Christmas morning (lost in Denver, they believe) when it was hand-delivered to Presho, just in time for the exchange of the presents packed therein.
      Sister Julie is in her first year as a social worker at a Beverly Healthcare nursing home and rehabilitation center in Rapid City. The Augustana College grad is also in the process of getting her master’s in counseling, so she can one day be a school counselor.
      Renee (Long) teaches eighth grade language arts at Chamberlain Middle School. “That’s adventure enough for me,” she says.
      Tom is a senior agronomy major at South Dakota State University, and he intends to farm with his parents. The family farm, halfway between Kennebec and Presho, was owned by Jan’s parents, Thomas and Ina Brakke, who took it over in 1934.
      Kevin indicated that his conditioning was going by the wayside, because of all the good feeding he was getting at the Raberns over the holiday. Tom did get Kevin out horseback riding while he was visiting the family, but they had a little trouble finding a saddle whose stirrups they could lengthen enough to match Kevin’s long inseam.
     
     

Vern Halter finishes well in Iditarod dogsled race
By Greg Latza

     Iditarod results, pictures, and stories can be found at the websites of South Dakota photographer Greg Latza and musher Vern Halter's sponsor Wells Fargo: http://www.peoplescapes.com/Iditarod.html and http://66.231.15.194/Halter/index.cfm