Posted on October 29, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Finishing Crazy Horse

Are the mountain carvers preparing to set a completion date?

By Paul Higbee

Seventy-seven years into sculpting at Crazy Horse Memorial, there was a burst of technical developments in 2025 perhaps unparalleled in previous carving seasons. The advances — driven by young, confident, whip-smart South Dakotans — might even bring the memorial’s completion date into sight.

On a cool Black Hills summer morning atop Thunderhead Mountain, more than a mile above sea level, a dozen workers assembled to continue cutting the massive figure of the 19th century Lakota legend from the mountain’s granite cap. They are experts in wielding power drills, rock saws, hand chisels, jet-fuel torches, and also at fabricating unique tools suited to this type of sculpture.

A new Liebherr 1000 EC-H tower crane was embedded in 8 feet on concrete by the Morrow Equipment Company. The robotic arm reaches 263 feet in all directions — the very same distance as Crazy Horse’s outstretched left arm.

More likely than ever, answers Caleb Ziolkowski, the director of mountain carving. He believes the world’s largest sculpture could be finished in decades, not centuries as observers a generation ago sometimes projected. Caleb, 41, believes the work may be mostly done in his lifetime. Children alive today almost certainly will see its completion.

Caleb and his brother, Vaughn, who is three years younger and in charge of day-to-day mountain operations, are grandsons of original Crazy Horse sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Their grandfather worked on the massive carving for more than three decades. He died in 1982, before Caleb and Vaughn were born.

Korczak was such a big personality that some observers saw the project as a one-man show. However, the charismatic artist always answered to a board of directors. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has remained a constant force and today’s CEO, Whitney Rencountre II, 46, comes with a background unlike any of his predecessors. He grew up on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota, a son of Indian Country who hails from, as Crazy Horse famously said, “where my dead lie buried.”

Even before Rencountre took charge in 2022, the mountain was quieting. Absent is a sound that many recall from Korczak’s era: blasting to remove rock. Sometimes there were ceremonial night blasts, with the public invited, that marked special occasions. “But we haven’t used explosives for the past nine years,” Caleb says.

Today’s scientific methods differ greatly from Korczak’s approach. He often labored alone, utilizing hardened muscles, explosives, jackhammers and a bulldozer. The 2025 crew put that old-school hardware to use, too, but this spring Caleb also spent several weeks learning to operate the remote-controlled crane and a German-made robotic arm. The latter will be programmed for carving tasks in spots difficult for humans to reach and for repetitive work that could be painfully mundane for people. The only drawback may be that robotics and some other advanced technologies don’t function well when temperatures fall below 40 degrees. That limits full carving activity at Thunderhead Mountain to about 120 days per year.

Korczak was thought of as a self-taught artist. But Caleb has learned that his grandfather was always open to learning evolving technologies and to outside expertise. Technology development, then and now, “has always been market-driven,” Caleb says. “And when it comes to mountain carving, we’re a market of one.”

Still, there are other endeavors that parallel what mountain carvers do. In the mid-1970s, civil engineer Gary Renner surveyed Ziolkowski land in Custer County. He got to know Korczak and mentioned how engineers use coordinate geometry and surveyors when planning earth moving projects. Renner thought that system would work for calculating rock removal for the sculpture, too. Years later he demonstrated his idea successfully on the mountain and “basically gave the Crazy Horse carvers a new tool, and they ran with it,” Renner says.

The 2025 mountain carving team included (back row, from left) Isaac Parsons, Malcolm Guest, Warren Nash, Brady Rose, Jesse Wheeler, Evan Bennett, Caleb Ziolkowski and Chaytan Palmier; (front row, from left) Vaughn Ziolkowski, Kayden Varland, Kenneth Kiser, Cody Castelan, Skyler McGiveron and Joey Meboe.

Caleb and Vaughn’s grandfather designed the carving in the 1940s — Crazy Horse astride a steed and pointing to lands his people lost to Euro-American geographic expansion. But Korczak always knew he would struggle and compromise as the mountain revealed its geology. “That hasn’t changed,” Caleb says. “I’m honoring my grandfather’s vision and the laws of physics.”

Korczak set the project up for perpetual financial struggle by proclaiming that it would never accept government money. The foundation relies on visitor admissions and individual and corporate support. In 2025, the year the term DOGE entered the American vocabulary, that commitment never looked wiser. After all, struggles “are part of the part of the DNA of this place,” Caleb says.

Millions of Americans first caught a glimpse of the burly, bearded Korczak Ziolkowski, and heard his Boston-accented voice, in June of 1961 when he appeared on a national TV game show called “To Tell the Truth” and explained his dream to a celebrity panel. Television and newspaper reporters, eager for rugged Black Hills adventure, beat a path to his mountain north of Custer. They watched Korczak carve, heard stories about his rough upbringing in Boston, and learned of his role as an assistant to Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1939.

Caleb has researched his grandfather’s life and that of the significant Lakota chief Standing Bear, who believed Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) best represented unwavering resistance to encroaching settlement in the 19th century. “I don’t believe Standing Bear had much interest in the arts until he saw what Gutzon Borglum was doing at Mount Rushmore,” Caleb says. “By 1931 he was in contact with Borglum about a possible Crazy Horse mountain carving.”

Rushmore kept Borglum occupied for the rest of his life. When Standing Bear read how Borglum’s assistant, Ziolkowski, had won first prize in a sculpture competition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, he approached Ziolkowski and found him intrigued. Others were less enthused, including U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Caleb recounts that Ickes listened to Standing Bear’s vision and replied, “Those are lovely words, but I don’t like my mountains carved.”

Standing Bear persevered even as his sculptor of choice left for World War II combat in Europe. At some point a government official advised Standing Bear to consider Porcupine Butte, between the Black Hills and Pine Ridge. “Standing Bear said no, that Crazy Horse gave his life in defending the Black Hills,” Caleb says. “The Black Hills were where this memorial had to be. Standing Bear didn’t just suggest this project, he fought for it.”

Caleb Ziolkowski (left) and his brother, Vaughn, are the grandsons of Korczak Ziolkowski, who blasted the first bits of granite off Thunderhead Mountain in 1948.

He was joined in the fight by Ziolkowski, who returned to South Dakota in 1947. Together they secured Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills’ high granite country, in part by utilizing laws that make mining a priority. Mountain sculpting, after all, can be classified as mining. “I’m impressed that my grandfather believed in this enough to make it his life’s work when he was in a position to live comfortably pursuing commissioned sculpture,” Caleb says.

Those he touched were similarly committed, including his first wife, professional musician Dorothy Comstock Ziolkowski, whose support never wavered even after the couple divorced. His second wife, Ruth Ross Ziolkowski (Caleb and Vaughn’s grandmother), became a true South Dakota icon as she led the Crazy Horse project for 32 years after Korczak’s death. “I can’t carve a mountain,” Ruth said, but she promised to do anything else she could behind the scenes. That included leading project and financial planning with the board, raising 10 children (some of whom proved they could carve a mountain), welcoming a sitting U.S. president to the site, and answering phones. Ruth’s voice was heard by countless callers when they telephoned the memorial.

It’s hard to overstate what Ruth did in moving the project forward in the late 1980s when she broke from her husband’s carving plan to focus on, and complete, Crazy Horse’s face. There was pushback from some close to the project but, Caleb says, his grandmother demonstrated “bravery in staying with the idea of altering the plan.” Ruth and Korczak’s daughter, Monique, stepped up as head sculptor during that period. The face (87.5 feet long) became the carving’s first fully discernible feature and won the project immense public credibility. Today it gazes across the Black Hills, as recognizable to South Dakotans as Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln just down the road.

Crazy Horse’s face is bigger than the Rushmore likenesses, so it surprises people to learn that it will encompass only 1.7 percent of the finished sculpture. That’s a reminder of how huge the completed memorial will be: 641 feet long and 563 feet high. People who snap a picture of Thunderhead Mountain from the visitors’ center may feel they’re fairly close but, in fact, are 4,000 feet away. The finished sculpture will comprise 300,000 square feet of finished surface, compared to Mount Rushmore’s 10,000 square feet.

Caleb earned a master’s degree in statistics at UCLA and a Ph.D. in law and diplomacy from the same university. He had previously studied at Tufts University. “You can’t get a degree in mountain carving, but I sort of selected classes and made my own major,” he says.

“Caleb is beyond brilliant and always kind,” says Kay Jorgensen, the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation’s past chair who played a role in hiring him. Like Rencountre, the Ziolkowski brothers are successful products of a small South Dakota town — in their case Custer. Their father Joel (Ruth and Korczak’s son) is a longtime pastor there. Caleb and Vaughn credit their aunt Monique for bringing them into substantive creative work at Crazy Horse.

Their workforce on the mountain hails from across the country, some with small town South Dakota roots similar to what Caleb, Vaughn and Whitney knew. By contrast, Tom Castelan had never heard of Crazy Horse Memorial until he visited the Black Hills from Arkansas several years ago. Impressed by what he saw, Castelan applied for a job and got it. Today he manages a big shop built into the mountainside and fabricates heavy-duty carving equipment not commercially available and maybe not even invented yet. Accepting a job here means committing to a process of perpetual learning. A few hundred feet from the machine shop on that summer morning, carvers were gearing up to tackle granite with noisy drills. Suddenly a sharp metallic clanking pierced the air as Tyler Brezke, a Webster native, used a manual chisel and hammer to add details near the great figure’s left hand.

The most recent work on the mountain has involved shaping Crazy Horse’s left arm and fingers.

Several blocks of granite, car-sized and bigger, sat on ledges near the summit and reflected an important way in which procedures here differ from Mount Rushmore’s. There, when granite was blasted or chiseled away, it fell and broke and comprised a rocky slope that remains in place today. In fact the “talus slope,” as the National Park Service calls it, is now considered part of Mount Rushmore and will never be removed. Caleb calls a similar rocky slope below Crazy Horse “the muck pile.” He plans to remove it all, enhancing the sculpture’s height and also yielding the granite blocks for construction projects. Each is labeled, documenting where on the sculpture it originated.

“As building material it will be meaningful because of where it comes from,” Caleb says. The granite could end up in structures anywhere across the region and will certainly be part of the buildings in a developing complex below the mountain, which already includes the Indian Museum of North America, the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, and the Indian University of North America. Eventually, Rencountre and the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation board hope to see a medical training center developed there. Visitors often say the museum, originally designed by Korczak and Ruth’s late daughter, Anne, is the off-mountain component currently most developed and meaningful for them. In the 1970s and ’80s, Anne took on a huge responsibility in seeking exhibit items not only from Great Plains peoples, but from tribes across the American continent. Sometimes when Rencountre sees visitors fully engaged in studying one of the museum exhibits, or enjoying cultural presentations, it reminds him of when he left Crow Creek to attend Black Hills State University and the joy he felt in a learning community where students and faculty genuinely cared about his people’s stories. As Caleb studies technologies that will improve cutting granite, Rencountre is looking into technologies that will enhance museum storytelling. Though their tasks and backgrounds differ, the young men have become great friends.

A day may come, Caleb says, when the public “sees the mountain as the smallest part of it all.” He adds that then no one will ask when the project will be completed because the educational aspects and human services missions of the memorial — as with other proven institutions — will hopefully never end.

In 2025, there have been moments that brought satisfaction in their own right, sometimes separate and more immediate from the memorial’s lofty goals. “I remember thinking,” Caleb says, “for the longest time, how cool it would be to set up one of the world’s largest free-standing cranes on top of a mountain.”

This year Caleb, Whitney and their workers did exactly that — and it might be the catalyst that helps bring the family’s original vision to fruition faster than anyone could have dreamed.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on October 28, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Saving Sgt. Murphy

How two South Dakotans rescued a third in the jungles of Vietnam.

By John Andrews

Gene Murphy couldn’t feel his legs. He’d been in the jungles of Vietnam for more than 10 months and was 45 days away from returning relatively unscathed to his hometown of White. Then a North Vietnamese Army soldier popped out of the thick undergrowth and shot him three times, twice through the right side, severely damaging his spinal cord.

Fortunately, as the firefight raged around him, he was not alone. Lyle Bowes, his friend and fellow South Dakotan, found him lying in the thick grass and bamboo several yards off trail. Murphy had been one of six soldiers from his company wounded that afternoon. A medevac helicopter hovered a short distance away, one wounded soldier already aboard and another hanging from its jungle penetrator.

But as Murphy waited to be evacuated, he and Bowes heard the pilot over their company’s radio frequency. “It’s too hot. We have to abort. I’ll be back in the morning,” the pilot said as the chopper ascended and flew away over the mountains amidst heavy fire from the NVA.

Murphy and Bowes were devastated. Would the pilot really come back the next morning? Even so, would Murphy survive the night?

Lyle Bowes (standing) and Gene Murphy spent 14 hours in the Vietnam jungle awaiting rescue after Murphy was wounded in 1969. The experience bonded them, and they remain close.

*****

Of the roughly 400 people who lived in White in the 1960s, 38 men served in Vietnam, including Murphy, his brother Bob and two first cousins. Murphy grew up playing baseball and softball in the summertime and basketball and eight-man football for White High School, graduating in 1966.

High school football was also a highlight for Bowes, who grew up on a farm 6 miles northeast of De Smet. His two older brothers had both left the farm by the time he was 9, so Bowes learned early the rigors of farm work as he helped his father. Still, life in rural Kingsbury County felt idyllic. “You never had to worry about not being able to trust people,” Bowes says. “If somebody needed their corn shelled, you all grabbed your shovels and headed over there. It was a very community-minded way of life.”

Murphy studied for a year at South Dakota State University in Brookings, but in the fall of 1967 dropped out to work construction. He wanted to re-enroll in January of 1968, but he wondered about his draft status, so he visited the local draft board. “I talked to the young lady, and she said she’d check,” Murphy recalls. “She went in another room and came back. ‘You’ll be getting a letter tomorrow,’ she told me, which I did.”

Meanwhile, Bowes was attending Dakota State University in Madison. “I didn’t care for school, but we were encouraged to go to college,” he says. “It was September or October, and I was sitting in a classroom. I looked out the window and the sun was shining, and the leaves were falling, and I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ I knew I was going to get drafted if I left because that’s just what happened. I had my brother take my books back on Monday morning and I volunteered for the draft.”

When Bowes boarded a Greyhound bus in Brookings bound for the military induction center in Sioux Falls, the only open seat was next to Murphy. They became quick friends and found themselves together throughout their training and service in Vietnam.

They attended boot camp together at Fort Lewis in Washington. They were together for advanced training in mortars and flew together to Cam Ranh Bay, one of three ports where American servicemen arrived or departed South Vietnam. They were entering a war zone, but remained optimistic, perhaps naively. “We felt encouraged because we were separated a little bit from the line company,” Bowes says. “We were support fire, so our hope was that would protect us in some way.”

But after a few days at Cam Ranh Bay, Murphy and Bowes learned they had been assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. “I remember raising my hand and saying there had to be some mistake,” Murphy says. “We were trained on heavy weapons mortars, not infantry. They said, ‘You’ll learn real quick.’”

A week later a helicopter flew them into the jungles of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Murphy remembers looking across a landscape of crude tents made out of ponchos and dirty soldiers who hadn’t bathed in months crawling out from the thick bamboo. That’s when Bowes turned to him and said, “Murph, I think we’re in deep trouble.”

Murphy and Bowes trained in mortars but spent their tours with the 4th Infantry Division in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

*****

Bowes says the Central Highlands reminded him of the Black Hills in terms of size, but that’s where the similarities ended. Every plant and tree seemed to have sharp spikes jutting from its trunk or stem. They quickly became familiar with wait-a-minute vines, a rope-like plant that grew like creeping jenny but sported thorns like a fine saw that pulled at their legs. When entangled, a soldier had to ask his buddies to wait a minute as he freed himself.

The critters were just as infuriating. Huge mosquitoes tried relentlessly to sting through ponchos. Vicious red ants jumped off the bamboo and onto soldiers, then reared up on their back legs and dug into exposed flesh. Leeches attached themselves to pores and became engorged with blood. A green viper about 12 to 18 inches long was called a step-and-a-half snake because, Murphy was told, “If they bite you, you’ll have a step and a half before you’re dead.” Once, Bowes and few buddies were sitting under a tree when they glanced up and saw a 25-foot python lounging on a branch directly overhead.

Murphy and Bowes spent the majority of their time in the Central Highlands running night ambushes, four-man long-range reconnaissance patrols or search and destroy missions. They were based out of Camp Enari south of Pleiku, though they only saw it twice during their time in the jungle.

Their company was on the move April 20, 1969, but their route over a mountain was steep and wet. Bowes found another path where steps had been cut into the mountainside. “That scares you, because you know who’s out in the jungle cutting steps,” Bowes says. “It’s NVA, and they’ve been there a while. So I started up the steps and they had sentinels out. One of them took off; I heard him going through the jungle. The captain spread us out because you don’t know how many are there. We worked our way up the hill and started getting into fights.”

Murphy was walking point with his squad when he was hit. “I didn’t see him, but they said he was only about 20 feet from me,” Murphy says. “He popped out of this little spider hole. He shot me first and I thought he’d blown my legs off because I was numb from the waist down. I played dead on him right away, but then I moved. I felt for my thighs, and I tipped my head just to see the tips of my boots and he shot another 30-round burst at me. I could see them coming up my right leg. The dirt was just flying. So I pulled myself behind a big tree.”

Bowes ended his pursuit of the NVA sentinel and called in artillery. That’s when his captain told him that six of their soldiers had been wounded. “I asked him if there was any reason why I couldn’t go and help get those guys out of there,” Bowes says. “He said I could go ahead.”

As he headed down the trail, he met another soldier with a badly wounded arm. Bowes asked who the other wounded men were.

“One of them’s Murphy,” the sergeant said.

“Gene Murphy?” Bowes asked.

“I don’t know any Gene,” he replied. “All I know is it’s Murphy.”

So Bowes continued down the trail yelling Murphy’s name over the gunfire. “If he’d have been unconscious, I would have had no idea where he was,” Bowes says. “But he heard me. He was off over in the jungle.”

When Bowes reached him, Murphy’s first words were, “What the hell took you so long?” Fueled by adrenaline, Bowes ripped two small trees out of the ground and wrapped a poncho around them, fashioning a crude stretcher. Then he and two other soldiers carried Murphy about 400 meters to their command post.

Murphy thinks he was injured at about 4:30 in the afternoon, which left plenty of daylight for evacuation. But there was no landing zone for the medevac chopper, which hovered over the treetops and lowered its jungle penetrator to extract the wounded soldiers. That left it vulnerable to heavy fire from the NVA. As the aircraft was riddled with bullets, the pilots knew they had to get out before they crashed. Bowes and Murphy watched the chopper fly away over the mountains.

They began to realize that they were in for a long night. Bowes dug a hole for the two of them and they settled in. An eerie silence descended over the battlefield. Each side refrained from firing their weapons because neither knew how large the opposing force was. “We sat there and whispered all night long because I had no idea what I was up against,” Bowes says. “We didn’t know where these guys were. We might get overrun. We didn’t know anything. There was nothing I could do and nothing he could do other than ask for water. I’d give him a capful at a time out of my canteen, just to wet his lips, because I didn’t know if that water was infected. That would have caused even more problems.”

Murphy and Bowes spent about 14 hours lying in the jungle. Around 7:30 the next morning a medevac chopper returned. This time, Bowes made sure Murphy was the first to board. He carried him to the landing zone, placed him on the jungle penetrator and watched as he flew to safety.

“I was thirsty,” Bowes says. “I hadn’t drunk any water since all this started because I wanted to make sure I had enough for him. I knew there was water in my canteen because I put it there. But when I picked it up, it was empty.” Unbeknownst to Bowes, Murphy discovered it at daybreak, thought it was his and drank it dry.

*****

Later that morning, Bowes wrote a letter to Murphy’s parents, telling them that their son had been wounded. (They received several official telegrams, as well). But since Bowes could only communicate with fellow soldiers in his company, he knew that he wouldn’t learn his friend’s fate until he received his own letter from home.

Murphy was flown to the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku, where he underwent the first of three surgeries he would eventually have to repair damage and stave off infection. But nothing could be done for Murphy’s spinal cord injury. On his third day there, a doctor and a chaplain told him he would never walk again. “I was angry,” Murphy says, “but in every hospital there was always somebody worse off than Sgt. Murphy. I had three buddies that were triple amputees, and one guy was a quadriplegic. I always thought I was fortunate.”

He began the long road of learning how to live without the use of his legs. He spent 18 days in the hospital at Pleiku, where doctors worked to stabilize him. Then he was transferred to the 106th Army General Hospital in Yokohama, Japan. After five and a half weeks there, he went to Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center just outside of Denver for nine and a half months of recuperation.

Murphy spent time in three Army hospitals recovering from his spinal cord injury and learning life skills.

Bowes finished his tour and returned to the United States in June of 1969. He was stationed briefly at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, which allowed him to visit Murphy at Fitzsimmons on the weekends. That October, he brought Murphy back to White on a 30-day convalescence leave. It was the first time Murphy had been home since June of 1968.

Huge banners greeted them as they entered town, and more than 200 people turned out to welcome him back. The homecoming proved good for soul and body. When Murphy left for Vietnam, he weighed 165 pounds. He was down to 135 pounds on the day he was wounded. Two months later, he weighed just 83 pounds. But the home cooking of friends and family helped him gain 20 pounds in a month.

In March of 1970, Murphy was transferred to a spinal cord center within the Veterans Administration in Milwaukee. He learned how to drive a car using hand controls in the parking lot of County Stadium, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, and learned other life skills before coming home to White for good in June.

He enrolled at Dakota State and later married Eldine Anderson, a farm girl from Bruce that he met at a party in White. The young couple then moved to Sioux Falls and both enrolled at Augustana University. Eldine studied nursing and Gene majored in business administration. While in college, Murphy started helping at the local Disabled American Veterans office. He was 16 credits short of graduating when he went to work for the DAV full time (Augustana awarded him an honorary degree in 2021). He’s held several titles there in more than 50 years, but Bowes calls him “Mr. VA of the USA.” Murphy has helped fundraise, shaped policy and met with presidents to further the cause of veterans. He was named the DAV’s national commander in 1987-1988.

Bowes delivered seed corn and then went into farming with his brother. He later found a job driving a gravel truck in Brookings, where he met Marcia Mannerud, whose father Erv operated a construction company. They were married, but the family business dissolved when Erv died of a heart attack in 1973. Lyle and Marcia purchased some of the company’s assets and eventually launched Bowes Construction, a business Lyle oversaw until his retirement in 2012.

Murphy and Bowes have been asked to share their story countless times and have been honored at several special events. One such occasion happened about five years ago at the South Dakota State Fair in Huron. Red Wilk, a Huron contractor and Vietnam veteran, presents the American Hero Award to a group of veterans every year during the Bull Bash, held at the fairgrounds grandstand. Around 10 veterans are honored each evening, and Bowes and Murphy were among the honorees. As they talked with other veterans before the presentation, Bowes heard Murphy shout, “Hey Lyle! This is the pilot!”

“Okay, so he was a pilot,” Bowes replied.

“No,” Murphy said. “This is the pilot!”

*****

Nobody realized it for about 40 years, but the man who flew Gene Murphy out of the jungle in Vietnam was John O’Connell, who spent nearly five decades as a crop duster near Letcher in Sanborn County. About 15 years ago, O’Connell attended a Vietnam veterans convention in Mitchell. When he walked in to buy a ticket, Murphy was sitting behind the table. They struck up a conversation about their tours in Vietnam and soon, details started to overlap. “All of a sudden, we just looked at each other and went, ‘Holy mackerel,’” O’Connell says. “We put it all together right there.”

Custer native John O’Connell, on the left with a Dustoff crew, was the pilot who flew Murphy out of the jungle. Their South Dakota connection remained unknown for more than 40 years.

O’Connell grew up in Custer. He became fascinated with aviation as a boy watching B-36 bombers glide into Ellsworth Air Force Base. He went to South Dakota State and enrolled in the ROTC flight training program, then became a flight instructor there for three years. “I had friends who came back from Vietnam and told me to get as much aviation training as I could before I went,” he says. “Your chances of surviving were a lot better.”

O’Connell headed to Vietnam in February 1969 and for the next year served as a medevac pilot with the 283rd Dustoff Detachment out of Pleiku, about 20 or 30 miles from the rescue site in the Central Highlands. He clearly remembers April 20, 1969. “That was the first time that I really got the crap shot out of my aircraft, so I remember it really well,” he says.

His medevac crew pulled two soldiers out of the jungle, but heavy small arms fire shut down the chopper’s electrical and communications systems. Fuel was also draining from the bullet-riddled tank in the belly of the helicopter. “We pulled the aircraft straight up until we got the guy on the cable out of the jungle and flew about a quarter of a mile to an open field and sat down. Just as we got on the ground the aircraft quit because it ran out of fuel.” O’Connell says they counted more than 300 bullet holes in the helicopter.

The crew returned the next morning to retrieve Murphy. When the two met in Mitchell decades later O’Connell wondered if things might have turned out differently if they had extracted him right away. “He was going to be the next guy on the hoist,” O’Connell says. “We were going to pull one more guy and then Gene. I’d always felt bad. I asked him if he would have been better off if we’d gotten him out of there sooner, but he said his spine was already damaged. Nobody was going to solve that problem.”

After Murphy introduced O’Connell to Bowes at the state fair, the two became fast friends, bonding over their time in Vietnam and a shared love of South Dakota State University and its sports teams. The three have also occasionally gathered for Veterans Day presentations.

The November holiday gives everyone a chance to reflect upon the sacrifices of our service men and women. Gene Murphy thinks about it every day. “How do you thank the guy who saved your life?” he asks. “The good Lord and Lyle Bowes saved Sgt. Murphy’s butt that day.”

Theirs is a friendship kindled on a Greyhound bus, forged in the jungles of Vietnam and sustained by their dedication to one another and their fellow veterans.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

100 Years of “Giants”

Ole Rølvaag’s classic homesteading novel offers lessons for South Dakotans today.

By Lance Nixon

The young teacher wants to write a book about homesteading in Dakota Territory, and by 1925 he’s finished with the work that some readers and critics will eventually consider an outstanding example of The Great American Novel.

But there’s a catch: This great American novel is published in another country, written in a different language, and most Americans won’t be able to read it until the translation of 1927 arrives under its English title: Giants in the Earth.

Ole Rølvaag was writing for Norwegians on both sides of the ocean. He wanted to finish his novel by 1925 in part to honor the first Norwegian immigrants to America, who had arrived exactly 100 years earlier. (He was also trying to finish before the well-known Norwegian novelist Johan Bojer finished The Emigrants about homesteaders in what is now North Dakota.)

Ole Rølvaag used stories from the Berdahls – his wife’s family – as the basis for his novel *Giants in the Earth*. Photos courtesy of the Norwegian American Historical Association

This year, descendants of those first Norwegian immigrants are commemorating the bicentennial of the journey as well as the centennial of Rølvaag’s saga. Those are important anniversaries in a state where more than 110,000 people — one out of every eight South Dakotans — claim Norwegian ancestry. The Center for Western Studies at Augustana University, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and the South Dakota Historical Society Press all recognized the significance and worked to celebrate the milestone in different ways.

Shortly after Delta David Gier became the music director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in 2004, he was given a copy of Giants in the Earth in order to better understand a portion of South Dakota’s cultural history. He later discovered that Douglas Moore, a great American composer of the mid-20th century, had written a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera based on the novel in 1951. When the orchestra performed the piece in April, it was the first time audiences had heard the music since 1973.

“We were happy to be able to rediscover it,” Gier says. “The opera world couldn’t wait to hear it, and there’s not a better musical entity than the South Dakota Symphony to take up the mantle.”

Gier says the music is evocative of the wide-open spaces and loneliness that Rølvaag’s characters experience on their claim in Dakota Territory. South Dakota Public Broadcasting recorded the performance and plans to make it available online.

Harry Thompson, executive director of the Center for Western Studies, says milestones like centennials often remind people of important events, and so Giants in the Earth was a topic of the university’s annual Dakota Conference, where the theme was “Settling and Resettling the Plains.” But Rølvaag’s masterful telling of 19th century European immigration and the westward movement isn’t the touchstone that it once was, he noted.

“Giants in the Earth used to be required reading in schools around the country,” Thompson says. “I was required to teach the novel at Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, when I was doing my teaching practicum in 1976. It is no longer required nationally, and I’d be surprised to learn that many schools in South Dakota or Minnesota require it.”

Andrew Berdahl was pictured atop a haystack in 1908.

Still, Dedra McDonald Birzer, the director of research and publishing for the South Dakota Historical Society Press, says many of the novel’s themes remain relevant today. The press published a 100th anniversary edition with a new introduction and annotations by scholar Allan C. Carlson, a historian of Nordic immigration and culture.

The new annotations help explain concepts from the book that may not be as well known today, such as Norwegian mythology, Lutheran understandings and scriptural references. But, Birzer says, it was important to retain the novel’s original integrity. “We kept the original introduction by Lincoln Colcord, who was also the translator and someone who Rølvaag worked closely with,” Birzer says. “We basically added bookends to each side. I’ve known Allen Carlson for a long time. Our ancestors are from the same part of Sweden, so we’ve talked a lot of Scandinavian history. I knew he was well versed in the things we hoped to bring out, such as its impact and the things that Rølvaag was trying to accomplish.”

Rølvaag’s novel was published in Norwegian in two volumes in 1924 and 1925 under the titles, I de dage (In those days) and Riket grundlegges (The Founding of the Kingdom). The English version of two years later takes its title from the same verse of scripture, Genesis 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days ….”

In English it was a Book of the Month Club selection and sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first year, with a publisher’s poster proclaiming it, “The fullest, finest and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America.”

Carlson sees Rølvaag’s novel as much more than an account of one ethnic group’s experience. Native Americans appear briefly. The Norwegian settlers are afraid, although the novel’s protagonist Per Hansa befriends them. Similarly, the Norwegians make friends with a competing group of Irish settlers, despite friction over competing land claims.

Carlson views Rølvaag as rejecting both Anglo-American preeminence and the idea of the “melting pot” to affirm instead “a vision of the United States as a democracy of ethnicities, a unique place where Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and American Indians — along with Europeans — could and should preserve their languages and ethnicities.”

Birzer agrees. “We see this a lot with Beret (Per Hansa’s wife), the idea of hanging on to that Norwegian culture and language and not becoming so American that part of your identity is lost,” she says. “Rølvaag spoke and wrote a lot about that. He thought you should have a distinct culture that is very much part of your identity and then go from there.”

Much of Rølvaag’s research came from interviews with the Berdahl family, who made the trek to Dakota by wagon train. Rølvaag’s wife, Jennie, was a Berdahl.

“Rølvaag depended heavily on his father-in-law, Andrew Berdahl, and other relatives for the factual information that is in the novel,” says Solveig Zempel, Professor Emerita of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Rølvaag’s granddaughter. “They were part of an 11-wagon train that went from Fillmore County in Minnesota to Minnehaha County in Dakota Territory in 1873.”

The Berdahls settled in Edison Township, just north of Sioux Falls and west of Garretson. Rølvaag placed the characters in his novel farther west, though Per Hansa files on a homestead in Dakota the same year that the Berdahls arrived.

Rølvaag wrote many letters to his in-laws seeking information as he was writing. “He wrote much of the novel in his cabin the forest in Itasca County, Minnesota, and wrote the rest when he was in Oslo, Norway,” Zempel says. “The land where the cabin was located on Big Island Lake is now part of the Chippewa National Forest, and the cabin itself has been relocated to Sioux Falls. It is currently on the campus at Augustana.”

Rølvaag wrote in this cabin on Big Island Lake in Minnesota. It now stands on the Augustana University campus in Sioux Falls.

What sets Giants in the Earth apart and makes it a truly great novel — some would argue the greatest novel ever written about Dakota — is the way Rølvaag deals with the psychology of his characters. That has made his work influential in odd and perhaps controversial ways. The first great historian of the Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb, used Rølvaag’s novel as one of his proof texts for his argument that the Great Plains in its early period was a man’s country where women didn’t feel at ease.

“This story brings out clearly the difference in the effect of the Plains on the men and on the women,” Webb writes. “Men have loved the Plains with a primitive simplicity; women have been repelled from them as from a mysterious and dangerous world. So it is with Per Hansa, the man, and Beret, his wife. To Per Hansa everything was possible … With Beret it was different. She resented the country by the time she entered it — the vastness, the solitude, the newness and strangeness of it all.”

Per Hansa can scarcely believe that as an immigrant — not yet an American citizen, not even able to speak English to any extent — he can still get 160 acres of free land by filing on a homestead and then proving up. “Isn’t it stranger than a fairy tale, that a man can have such things here, just for the taking?” he asks Beret.

Everything Per Hansa touches seems to succeed. Once a fisherman in the Lofoten Islands (as was Rølvaag before he came to America in 1896), he rigs nets to catch waterfowl on the Dakota marshes with his sons. He makes money by trading for furs with the Sioux Indians at Flandreau and then selling the furs for a profit in Minnesota. He plants his wheat at the wrong time, and it still germinates and produces a bumper crop despite a late snowstorm.

Carlson notes that in his extraordinary success, Per Hansa is like “the Ash Lad” of Norwegian folktales, Askeladden — the male Norwegian counterpart of Cinderella — who always seems to triumph.

But Beret’s fairy tale is darker. She misses her family and the familiar terrain of Norway. She wonders how people can even live in Dakota, a great desolation where there’s not a thing to hide behind. She feels more and more oppressed with the “monsterlike” plain of Dakota until finally she begins to see something like a troll face grimacing at her out of the prairie landscape.

“I think Per Hansa and Beret might be considered two sides of the psychology of immigration,” Zempel says.

Ironically, for one who’d written so brilliantly about Dakota, Rølvaag didn’t stay in the place where he set his best novels. He worked as a farmhand near Elk Point for two years before enrolling at Augustana Academy in Canton. After graduating in 1901, he attended St. Olaf College, where he eventually became the head of the Norwegian Department. He died in Northfield in 1931.

Though he spent just a few years in South Dakota, his great novel remains anchored here and still offers food for thought for modern readers. “A reminder of how much we consider what it means to be an American comes out of this immigrant experience,” Birzer says. “In a place like South Dakota, almost everybody has immigration stories, one generation or five generations back, and sometimes those stories have been lost. I still think that is such a shaping experience.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on August 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Breath Taking

Unique staircases and walls in our mountainous Black Hills towns are both practical and charming

By Paul Higbee

AS AN 8-year-old I envied Hot Springs kids. Visiting from Iowa, I always noticed where children in other towns walked to and from school. Hot Springs had built-in adventure. There were sidewalks along a steaming river and a long flight of stone steps from downtown to a hilltop school overlooking town.

A stone staircase climbs the hill to the Pioneer Museum in Hot Springs.

I imagined enrolling at Hot Springs and bounding up those stairs like a mountain goat every morning and then, at 3, leaping down three steps at a time with plenty of hang time, like a hawk dropping back to earth.

Southwestern South Dakota had three things my region of Iowa didn’t: thermal springs, contrasting elevations to negotiate, and a ready supply of pink sandstone with which to build. In the late 19th century Fred Evans and others quarried that sandstone for distant markets, but kept much of it for shaping their town. Hotels, hospitals, sanitariums and covered pools were created, making Hot Springs what we’d call today a medical tourism destination. People from everywhere, with a wide range of ailments, arrived by train seeking remedies in naturally warm waters.

“An important part of her work in healing the sick and recreating the tired vacationist is that she should always appear trim and smiling,” wrote poet and historian Badger Clark in his classic When Hot Springs was a Pup. “Beauty is her business.” The soft glow of pink sandstone contributed to that, whether worked into the architecture of the incredible Evans Hotel or State Soldiers Home, or into something as practical as a retaining wall or exterior stairway that moved patients from hotel lodgings to therapy.

There’s a price to pay for beauty, though. Mayor Bob Nelson reports the two oldest stairways have been city maintenance challenges for a long time. “Because of their deteriorating condition, the city has closed these sets of stairs for safety reasons,” he says, but that doesn’t mean they’re abandoned. Hot Springs hired a firm to look at the design and cost of replacing the steps, with the idea being to keep the original look and feel. “It’s early in the process,” Nelson says, but the firm’s report will put Hot Springs “in a better position to look for grant opportunities to help fund the replacement of the stairs.”

Challenge Dakota is a nonprofit organization that works with the city to raise funds for supporting stair repairs and future renovations. And decades after I wished to join the ranks of Hot Springs youth utilizing the steps, Challenge Dakota encourages people of all ages to climb them for fitness. “Stairs, Stripes & Steps” is an annual springtime race. In recent years a much more solemn event, the “9/11 Grand Stairway Challenge,” has seen about 100 climbers move up and down that particular set of stairs 15 times each September 11. That matches the number New York firefighters climbed during the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The rigorous ritual memorializes 343 firefighters who died that day.

The summer I first encountered Hot Springs, my family also visited the northern Black Hills towns of Lead and Deadwood — places similarly built for negotiating steep climbs daily. Moving down Lead’s Main Street in our station wagon, I noticed stairs that connected side streets layered on top of one another, and more noticeable than yards in front of homes were rock walls. Each wall had an entrance from street level, and often beyond the entrance stone stairs climbed to the home’s front door. The walls, of course, were retaining walls so that yards and houses wouldn’t slide away. I also noticed garages cut into hillsides. Knowing the town was home to a big gold mine, I imagined some of the garages might be back entrances into the mine. Often these garages — mostly gone now — were built in small clusters adjacent to a stairway that climbed to hillside homes.

The Grand Stairway leads up the steep grade from National Avenue to the Battle Mountain Sanitarium in Hot Springs.

“There were some long climbs,” says lifelong Lead resident Bob Phillips. From Main Street, in several locations, stairs moved pedestrians up and down both sides of Lead’s gulch as far as there were houses. An exceptionally long flight began near the Kirk power plant outside town, led over a mountain, and into Lead. It’s possible no other town in the United States claimed more outdoor steps per capita if mine shafts could be considered outdoors. Homestake Gold Mine’s Ross and Yates elevator shafts, dropping thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface, had stairs running the entire distance for emergencies and maintenance. On the surface, the mining company was no less prolific, linking its hillside refineries, stamp mills, and other industrial buildings with outdoor stairways.

Homestake always embraced innovation and so did Lead. Early in the 20th century, the community began replacing its wooden steps with concrete ones. “There were flat platforms in spots where you could catch your breath,” Phillips recalls, “and in places where it was possible, the stairs broke for sections of inclined sidewalk. In steeper areas we had what we called baby steps.” Baby steps weren’t designed for toddlers, but for anyone who could climb more easily up stairs that were full-sized except for a shallower vertical lift per step.

There were no baby steps built into a famous flight that climbed from Lead High School’s locker rooms to Mountain Top Field, an athletic venue created by slicing off the top of an adjacent ridge. Playing high school football in the thin air of mile-high Lead could challenge athletes from lower elevations, and the pre-game climb to the field didn’t help. But for local players, Phillips says, “it was your way of loosening up.” Lead and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) took action to prevent erosion off the mountain by building a retaining wall, a couple stories tall and a football field in length, in 1938.

Deadwood, in its storied gulch a couple miles down the road from Lead, is one of the country’s best examples of valuing and preserving sets of hillside stairs and native stone retaining walls. Deadwood and Lead, much more than Hot Springs, developed as gritty gold-prospecting towns turned blue-collar industrial communities featuring mines as well as ore processing mills. Nobody said beauty was their business. Yet both are remarkably pretty, and not only because of their natural settings. These were also places where stone architecture shaped the communities, some of it created by immigrants drawn to gold country who traced their skill to Old World family trades. Most Deadwood building stone, in contrast to pink sandstone of the southern Hills, is what the partisan Badger Clark would have dismissed as plain brown or even as dried beef liver in color. It came from the geological feature called the Deadwood Formation. It’s actually no less eye-catching than Hot Springs’ rock. Retaining walls define narrow streets above Main and have inspired artistry. Look for stones arranged to resemble a lizard on Denver Street, along with a likeness of Deadwood and Galena’s famous historical pet, the coyote Tootsie. Both images, subtle rather than in-your-face, were created by stone-worker Marvin Lehman.

Deadwood Historic Preservation Officer Kevin Kuchenbecker (right), pictured with City Archivist Michael Runge, says the city’s many staircases provide a pedestrian urban trail experience.

“Most retaining walls in Deadwood are the properties of homeowners, who are responsible for them,” says Deadwood Historic Preservation Officer Kevin Kuchenbecker. “A wall serves a function but probably doesn’t increase a home’s value. But it will hurt it if it fails.” Fortunately for homeowners, the city will pay a large percentage of a wall’s replacement (work that is put up for a public bid and must involve an engineer if the wall exceeds 4 feet in height). “Right now,” Kuchenbecker says, “I’ve got about 25 walls on a waiting list and usually I have funding for four a year.” If a retaining wall fails, however, it leap-frogs to the top of the list.

City funding for retaining wall maintenance and repair is generated from Deadwood gaming revenues. In addition to private property walls, Deadwood takes care of those found in its historic cemeteries, Mount Moriah and St. Ambrose. Both were developed on steep hillsides. “Shifting ground that could affect the positions of caskets would be a disaster,” Kuchenbecker says. In addition to eliminating that potential nightmarish scenario, the cemetery work has spruced up both burying grounds visually.

As is true for all historic preservation projects, knowing as much as possible about a property’s background is important. Michael Runge, city archivist and collections manager, says a key tool for that is a set of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps dating from 1885 to 1948. A glance at versions of the maps through the years reveals what structures survive and even what materials were used. Overlaying old maps with images of today shows most (but not all) stair routes are the same, although actual stairways have evolved from wood to steel. There are retaining walls now, however, that appear just as they were described more than a century ago.

Runge has turned to other historical sources, too. He admires author Estelline Bennett who moved to Deadwood with her family as a girl in 1877 and had her wonderfully descriptive book, Old Deadwood Days, published in 1928. Williams Street, a quiet residential neighborhood where her family lived, ran parallel to raucous Main Street and a level above it. Still, wrote Bennett, “stairways came up inquiringly from the gulch.” She could hear dance hall music from below, struggled to understand what prostitutes did, and was actually intrigued by gamblers. Guarded by her dog, Danger, Bennett felt safe running errands — even down the Wall Street stairs where “in its steep ascent ran the whole gamut of human morals.”

Deadwood visitors can retrace Estelline Bennett’s steps, up today’s steel version of the Wall Street stairs and onto Williams Street, still a quiet residential avenue. It’s a pedestrian “urban trail” experience, Kuchenbecker says, a good way for drivers who don’t like the narrow streets to park and see the full community. There’s historic signage and free guide maps throughout town (with suggested walks for Lead, too).

Kevin Kuchenbecker inspects a new wall along Whitewood Creek.

“We get archeologists involved in the work because often we uncover objects with historic value,” Runge says. It’s entirely possible to encounter contractors, repairing or reinforcing walls on those walks, because the effort is ongoing.

RCS Construction of Rapid City has successfully bid on many walls over the years. “I started working for RCS in 1999,” says Barry Wood, “and I’ve done one or two walls a year since. Every one is unique in its own fashion but they do the same work, holding up a house or a street. Back when many of these were built, miners or cowboys came in by horses with no equipment to move huge boulders. But they got the job done.”

Wall restoration typically involves gutting the interior, where rock is most likely to draw moisture that can eventually lead to failure. Interior rock is replaced with concrete, poured or block, and the concrete is enmeshed in fabric to prevent it from melding into the soil. The surface rock, or veneer, is put back in place and in the event some of the veneer has been damaged, Deadwood usually has a stockpile of historically authentic wall stones.

“I really enjoy working in Deadwood,” Wood says. “There’s a unique aura because of the history.”

I sensed that, too, on my first childhood visit. The feeling has drawn me back ever since.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on August 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Good on the Bad

Nemo painter Mark Zimmerman’s exploration of the anything-but-square Bad River valley

By Bernie Hunhoff

Wild landscapes inspire Black Hills artist Mark Zimmerman, so imagine his delight when he discovered the Bad River, which pigtails 161 miles from Fort Pierre to Philip in western South Dakota.

The river valley is a picturesque and sparsely populated stretch of ghost towns, grasslands and big ranches. Zimmerman researched, explored, photographed and sketched the region. Now he is creating art that he hopes will convey his love for a land most Americans consider flyover country.

Open spaces provide his greatest inspiration, but artist Mark Zimmerman’s home and studio are deep in the forest near Nemo.

“I want people to love it the way I do,” he says. “Of course, I know that doesn’t happen just from looking at a picture. I hope I can capture the feel of the space. If you are a child of the prairie, it’s in your soul, and if you are not then you might look at it and still see it as empty.”

Zimmerman is that child. He was born in Greeley, Colorado, east of the Rockies, and raised in Kansas and North Dakota. As a graduate student at Illinois State University, he discovered that he missed the wild prairie. He felt claustrophobic when surrounded by industrial landscapes. Even the Illinois farm fields were too square, too civilized — too straight.

A sculptor from Chicago once assessed Zimmerman’s paintings and told him that something was missing. Zimmerman remembers the critique: “He said, ‘That’s all great, but where is the other stuff? Where is the stuff you don’t like?’”

The painter never forgot the sculptor’s question. “I know what I don’t like about the land I love,” he says. “I don’t like the squares.” So, he began to insert squares in his paintings — jarring interlopers to otherwise natural shapes.

He returned to North Dakota and was working at The Arts Center in Jamestown when he met Mary Wipf, a visiting artist from the Black Hills. She told him that she lived on a small ranch in South Dakota. He imagined a windswept and treeless prairie homestead, which only added to her allure. They married and he moved to South Dakota in 1997.

As it turns out, the ranch is in the forested Black Hills, just a few miles from the tiny town of Nemo, but that hasn’t hindered their relationship or his art career; Mary looks for lichens and fungi in the lowlands, while he prefers to hike the ridgetops.

However, he still seeks opportunities to explore the open prairie. In autumn of 2001 he was awarded a state Arts Council grant to visit Harding County, which he once called “the last best corner” of South Dakota. He spent his days teaching art at the rural schools, and then he drove the backroads, shooting photographs of scenery that has inspired his art ever since.

Zimmerman seldom references his photos as he paints because the prairie is embedded in his imaginative mind. As he developed the Harding County series, his style changed from abstract to expressive landscapes that reflect his affinity for the land of barbed wire, native grasslands and dirt roads.

He also respects the ranching families. He remembers the fifth grader who drove herself to Painter School in a big truck, and the youngsters who spent recess catching garter snakes in a creek. “That was a long time ago and I’m still painting memories of that place.”

Twenty years after Harding County, Zimmerman became interested in the Bad River when he was invited to participate in a 2023 project called “Navigating Narratives: The Corps of Discovery in Titonwan Territory.” Craig Howe, the project’s curator, asked artists and writers to produce a work based on Lewis and Clark’s journal entries from late September of 1804.

Zimmerman chose September 25, a day when the explorers had a tense confrontation with the Lakota at the intersection of the Bad and Missouri rivers in today’s Fort Pierre. Even then, the waterway was known as the Bad River (wakpa sica) by Native Americans because of a major flood in 1738 that killed many people. Lewis and Clark called it the Teton River because of their confrontation with the Teton Sioux, but the original name has survived.

“I read and reread everything I could find from the journals about that day and then I forgot everything and just started to draw and paint landscapes,” Zimmerman says. “I drew circles for the sun and the moon and stars, and intrusive squares. While I was imagining the mouth of the Bad River, I got the idea to paint it like I did Harding County.”

He proposed another plan to the South Dakota Arts Council, and before long he was back in open country. “The first time I ever saw it, I was driving north of the little town of Midland on the Bad River Road,” he recalls. “My first impression was from high above the foothills, and it wasn’t what I had in mind. Then you drop into the valley, past Capa and Van Metre, and I said, ‘Yeah, this is what I like!’”

He took notes and photographs, and he soon wrote a poem of his travels that includes these lines:

Head out, up the Bad River Road,

A stranger in a rangeland,

Steer the gravelly ruts, dust billowing.

Step into wildly surging winds,

Rattling in dancing autumn cottonwoods,

Hissing in sparse, brassy grasses.

Wheel round wriggling rattlesnakes,

Squint into a blazing sun,

Taste gritty dirt

Sweeping the spaciousness.

He wrote of the Capa School (“gone are the laughing children … the forgotten dreams”) and of driving the Capa and Van Metre trails (“where gravel eventually tapers to wandering twin tire tracks, roads named for disappearing places”).

Zimmerman wandered the Bad River for four days. Cattle ranches dominate the valley. Cows and calves share grasslands with deer, pronghorns, eagles and a plethora of other wildlife. On the southern edge of the valley is Ted Turner’s 141,000-acre Bad River buffalo ranch.

In the evenings, Zimmerman retreated to the Farr House, a historic bed and breakfast in nearby Pierre that was once the residence of Governor Peter Norbeck. He sorted his digital photos and notes and did sketches that are now taking shape on canvasses at the studio he shares with Mary near their home, which is buried in the pine forest a few miles south of Nemo.

Nemo, he notes, is a Latin word for nobody, so it is a good place to contemplate his Bad River experience and convert it to art. The spacious studio, which they call Green Ink Gallery, is a remodeled horse barn. There are stalls for their two horses and hay mounds for a big tabby cat that shares the ranch with them, along with a German Shepherd they call Echo.

Most of the people who will see his paintings have never driven the Bad River Valley. He hopes to show them its natural shapes and curves, and its wild nature. “Sadly, there are subdivisions and cornfields and roads coming for it,” he says.

“We live on a sphere, and we’ve decided to cut it into squares. I view it as an imperiled landscape. Most of our prairie is already cut into squares, which seems like a crazy way of dealing with a landscape that’s anything but square.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

The Light of Night

Can we save South Dakota’s dark skies?

Story by John Andrews

Photography by Christian Begeman

Fieldwork kept a teenaged Christian Begeman out after sunset, and he was walking the half mile back to the family ranch house. He had a flashlight to help navigate, but as darkness descended over Dewey and Ziebach counties a full moon rose high in the sky, and stars as bright as millions of tiny flashlights danced overhead. He didn’t need his battery-powered companion. “As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I recognized that I could see a lot more than expected,” Begeman recalls. “The dips and ridges cast dark pools of shadows, which caused me pause to step into them. Then I realized it was the same path I already knew and soon I got up to nearly a full run without the aid of any light but the moon. It may have been a foolish thing to do in hindsight, but it was quite a rush.”

Diane Knutson, pictured with her husband Andrew and daughter Bridgette in the Badlands, is an advocate for preserving South Dakota’s dark skies. Photo by Steven Miller

Begeman fell in love with dark skies on that West River ranch and today spends his evenings photographing their beauty. The lesson he learned that night has become a main tenet among dark sky advocates today: the artificial light of ever-growing urban areas, oftentimes installed under the guise of improving safety and visibility, doesn’t always accomplish those tasks, and in turn, hampers our ability to appreciate the stars.

South Dakota boasts some of the darkest skies on Earth. Portions of the Black Hills National Forest and the Slim Buttes in Harding County are considered Class 1 locations on the Bortle Scale, a measure of night sky brightness developed by amateur astronomer John Bortle in 2001 that spans from 1 (the darkest) to 9 (inner city). Badlands National Park and several state recreation areas — located far from the lights of our biggest towns and cities — are Class 2.

Organizations like DarkSky International, founded in 1988, aim to slow the spread of light pollution. Diane Knutson is the association’s former president. Today, the Sioux Falls mother of two does volunteer work for the organization as a DarkSky Fellow. “The dark sky is best experienced rather than explained,” Knutson says. “It just kind of grabs hold of you.”

Knutson grew up in Dakota City, Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, a city of nearly 90,000 people and a metro area encompassing nearly 150,000. Still, the urban glow didn’t hamper the love for stargazing that began in her backyard. “As a kid I would go outside and see the night sky, run around with fireflies and experience it in its natural state,” she says. “That drew me in, and I’ve always had that inkling to keep that relationship. The dark provides us an invitation to personal solitude, stillness, silence and reflection.”

But it’s disappearing. Knutson says light pollution is increasing about 10 percent a year, and the pace is quickening because of advancements in artificial light technology, such as the development of LEDs. “LEDs are great in some respects, but because they use less energy, we use them more. They are more accessible and not as expensive to use, so we don’t think as much about turning them off.”

Knutson says it’s important to remember that artificial light doesn’t simply stay where the switch is. When traveling east on Interstate 90, she can often spot the glow from Sioux Falls — our largest city at nearly 210,000 people — before reaching Mitchell. “Light pollution is easily solvable. There are so many issues that are big and hard to reverse, but light pollution can be reversed with the flip of a switch, or a timer, or just not using it. It costs less money, it helps our health, it helps our experiences and connections with each other. The night as a whole ties us all together because it stretches across time and space. We can connect with people who lived millennia ago because we each have that sky we can connect with.”

After decades of dark sky advocacy, Knutson thinks South Dakotans are beginning to understand light pollution and are taking steps to address it. Several years ago, Rapid City began celebrating Dark Sky Week in April with festivals, speakers and programs. A section of downtown streetlights is extinguished, a small nod to reducing the city’s skyglow. The Badlands Observatory in Quinn offers night programs and the public is invited to star parties during the summer months hosted by the Black Hills Astronomical Society at the Hidden Valley Observatory just off Hidden Valley Road northwest of Rapid City. Badlands National Park’s annual Astronomy Festival (July 18-20) includes star parties each night, activities during the day and a scale model solar system tour and walk.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” Fortunately, the heavens are a wonderful, mysterious gift that unfold before our eyes every night — and nowhere more clearly than in the delightfully dark spaces of South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Singing the Blues in the Black Hills

Bobby Joe Holman has been to music’s proverbial mountaintop, and he believes he found its peak in South Dakota

By Bernie Hunhoff

BOBBY JOE HOLMAN’S face is weathered and whiskered. But it’s a fresh face to the Black Hills music scene and, as Muddy Waters would sing, Holman has his mojo working.

The country/blues artist has been entertaining audiences across the USA for most of his 76 years. He arrived in Rapid City in 2021 to be closer to his wife’s family. After playing in America’s bigger cities, some may wonder how he likes the small mountain towns of the Black Hills. Attend one of his gigs and you’ll hear the answer in every song.

“My heart and soul are happy,” says the Santa Claus look-alike who sometimes plays five or six nights a week in various venues throughout the Hills. “The body is giving out, but the mind is hanging together and I am at peace.”

Yes, that’s how Holman speaks — his sentences sound like verses to a Willie Nelson song, and these days the title could be “Lovin’ Life in South Dakota.”

Surrounded by military memorabilia, The Bobbys entertain at the VFW Club in downtown Rapid City.

Holman was born in the west Texas town of Seminole. He spent much of his childhood in southern California, where he strummed his first guitar. He was serving in the Navy, aboard a submarine during the Vietnam War, when he began a lifelong love affair with the harmonica.

“I love the harmonica because it never sounds the same,” he says. “It almost plays itself. I start a tone and one note leads to another, it’s not all that structured stuff.” He started out with the diatonic harmonica, but soon grew to also love the chromatic, which has a wide range of notes.

After his military service, he studied music in Mississippi and became a successful blues singer, playing in Nashville and on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He signed with Monument Records and found work in both radio and television.

He co-hosted a show called Across the Pond that featured U.S. and European jazz. Holman also became a successful author of “how to play” texts for the harmonica and taught the instrument at public schools, colleges, music stores and prisons. But commercial pursuits often interrupted his original love for a simple song.

“I’ve had a little bit of success,” Holman says of his career. “But the business end can suck you up. They’re always saying, ‘you should do this’ or ‘you have to do that.’ Now I don’t have to do anything but play the songs I love for people who want to hear them.”

Holman and his wife, Janet, came to Rapid City to live near Janet’s daughter, Genae, and her family. Genae’s husband is Bobby Sundby, a well-known local realtor and businessman. The two Bobbys became good friends, and soon they teamed up as a duo known, naturally, as The Bobbys.

“I needed a name I could remember,” Holman says with a laugh.

Bobby Sundby is well-versed in the Black Hills music scene. His brother, Johnny, is a notable photographer who plays music with a country-rock group called The Lonely Rangers. Their late father, John, was a popular Rapid City businessman and pilot who sang for decades with the Shrine of Democracy Chorus, a barbershop group.

“Our family has always been involved in music,” he says. “Our dad probably never said the word ‘gig,’ but he would love what we we’re doing and the way the music connects with people.”

Sundby says Holman is “one of the most upbeat, positive, encouraging and supportive human beings I’ve ever met. He’s opened up a new world to me, by encouraging me to play the guitar and sing. I started out playing drums at Augustana College. I love that I don’t have to haul the drums around anymore, but more importantly, it’s wonderful to grow as a musician.”

Sundby introduced Holman to the Black Hills. “When he married my mother-in-law, I heard about him playing in California. I didn’t know then how accomplished he was. The first time I heard him sing, we were hanging out as a family in the kitchen when someone asked him to play the guitar.

“I happened to be playing gigs with Wild Bill Days in Deadwood, so I invited him to join in and he was great. He has a comfort level and a gift for gab that the audience loves, and as a musician he has a rare quality. He likes to play a song a little different each time, and that makes it more fun and interesting for the musicians and the crowd. If he makes a mistake in front of people he’ll just laugh, and they like him all the more.”

Bobby Joe Holman is a fun-loving blend of Willie Nelson, Burl Ives and Ray Charles.

Sundby says Holman is a charming man, whether he’s having a private conversation or playing to a full house. “A friend of mine said he’s like a favorite grandpa that everyone loves.”

Holman laughs at such compliments. “Bobby likes to brag on me,” he says, “but the reward is all mine. And I couldn’t do this today without him.” He credits Sundby and South Dakotans as a whole for giving him a fresh start at his age, and he’s determined to learn all he can about the musical traditions of his new home.

He especially appreciates the band-friendly practices of the nightclubs that book The Bobbys. “Music-wise, there are a lot of events and venues, and they all try to pay you a fair wage here,” he says. “In Los Angeles, they treat you like a dog because they know that if you won’t do it there’s somebody else waiting in line.”

He also appreciates the cultural makeup of his new state. “I love that we have two cities, and all the rest are these little towns, and every town has its own soul, and the people have their own ways of seeing themselves. There is something beautiful about the way people get along here.”

Holman hopes to contribute the only way he knows — with his music. “I know I gotta stay healthy,” he says, “so I drink non-alcoholic beer. I love alcohol but it’s made me make a lot of really bad decisions. Now I practice every day and I learn new songs. I am blessed to have the dexterity and the voice to do what I love at this age.”

The Bobbys entertain at some of the Black Hills’ best-known venues and attractions, including the 1880 Train depot, Deadwood’s historic Landmark Casino, the Firehouse in downtown Rapid City and the Mount Rushmore KOA Resort, where they play outdoors on summer nights.

The Bobbys are still an unknown band to many in the Black Hills. They were booked to play at Terry Peak a few months ago when a typo in the advertisement listed them as The Boobys. “Every biker from a hundred miles around showed up,” Holman quips.

They also play at lesser-known places, including nursing homes where senior citizens in wheelchairs nod their heads to the blues. “The rest homes are such a rewarding experience,” Holman says. “Some of them are on their last roundup but you can see they are listening. The songs are touching them.”

He also likes to entertain at the VFW club on Main Street in Rapid City, where he banters with other veterans who mostly sit at the bar, far from the stage, but applaud every song. “I’m a proud lifetime member of the VFW, the Vietnam Veterans and the Sons of the American Revolution,” he says. “It’s a privilege to play there.”

Regardless of the venue or the demographics of his audience, Holman makes an impression. Sarah Smoke, who manages the 44 North Bar at the Baymont Inn in Sturgis, says The Bobbys have quickly become a crowd favorite. The blues music is amazing, she says, and Holman’s ability to connect with a roomful of strangers is rare. “He has a unique voice and he’s very skilled with the guitar and the harp, but it’s more than that,” Smoke says. “He is so comfortable with the music, and he creates an environment that is special and warm.”

Rural America never takes its musicians for granted because small town fans know a favorite singer or guitar player may be just one song away from leaving for the city. But Bobby Joe Holman came from the city. He’s been to the music world’s proverbial mountaintop, and now his only goal is to stay healthy and sing for the people of the Black Hills.

Editor’s Note: Readers can find upcoming gigs of Holman and Sundby on their Facebook page, which is titled The Bobbys: Two Guys, Two Guitars. This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 by john — Leave a comment

Yankton’s Downtown Strip

Yankton’s strip along the river has become a destination, and now the mall is re-opening. Is the town big enough for both?

Yankton’s entire commercial district by the Missouri River is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with 20 structures and landmarks. The corner of Third and Walnut (above) is considered the architectural core of the district.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Cathy Clatworthy remembers overhearing a customer who answered the phone while at the counter of her home décor shop in downtown Yankton.

“We’re doing The Strip!” laughed the customer.

Clatworthy says the customer explained, after ending the call with her husband, that it’s what she and her friends call a six-block stretch of stores and shops that parallel the Missouri River on the south edge of the old city.

“They love to walk from one end to the other and back,” she says. That would have been a short walk until the last few years because it seemed that mall shopping, big box stores, the COVID-19 pandemic and online shopping would end independent retailing forever. Forever, however, is short in today’s fast-changing economy.

A decade ago, Yankton still had JC Penney, K-Mart and other chain stores; most were in the Yankton Mall, 19 blocks north of the river. The riverfront seemed destined to become a financial district with a scattering of bars and antique shops.

“When the mall was really active, all the downtown retailers were just trying to get people to stop by the downtown stores when they were finished at the mall,” recalls Clatworthy. “I remember that we wanted to rent some display space in the mall to invite the shoppers to come downtown, but Dial Enterprises in Omaha, who then owned the mall, wouldn’t let us.”

Today, most of the retail giants are gone and small shops — including a big selection of clothing stores and a half-dozen stylish home furnishing shops — have opened in their wake. Every time a big box store closed, a few small shops popped up — mostly along Second and Third streets near the Missouri.

Cathy Clatworthy operates LilyCrest on Third Street.

Clatworthy traces the downtown district’s most recent resurgence to a community brainstorming session in 2017. Onward Yankton, a local nonprofit, recruited the state’s architectural community and Dakota Resources staff to meet with more than 100 Yankton activists. Together, they shared ideas and even made drawings of how the downtown area might look.

Locals agreed with the guest architects and designers that the town needed more downtown apartments, a sharper focus on historic preservation, better public gathering places and more shopping. Nothing happened overnight, but Clatworthy says all the goals are slowly being addressed.

Apartments and lofts above the storefronts are now home to hundreds of renters, and a new four-story apartment complex with 104 units called Gurney Flats just opened on the riverbank. Construction began in May on a seven-story loft that will alter the Yankton skyline.

Even the city’s once-sleepy bars have picked up the pace. Rock and country music bands entertain on weekend evenings in the variety of establishments, from the historic O’Malley’s and the Walnut (also dubbed the Dead Animal Bar because taxidermy mounts are the main décor) to newer places like Ben’s Brewing Company (a few blocks north of downtown) and the Boat House, a fun establishment with axe-throwing, music, darts and pizzas.

Onward Yankton members are raising money to restore the 1902 Dakota Theater. They even plan to reattach the theater’s unique, yellow 1940s Art Deco façade.

Kids and families love the splash pad near the foot of the historic Meridian Bridge.

The Black Steer, one of South Dakota’s oldest steakhouses, still serves filets and ribs, while several new eating establishments have opened — again, mostly within a block or two of the Missouri.

Today’s downtown entrepreneurs are scrappy. Clatworthy once had 20 antique vendors in her store. “Today’s generation doesn’t even want their own family heirlooms,” she laughs, so she refocused on picture framing, art and home furnishings. “I still keep a few antiques because they fit my building.”

Drew Delvaux and Zeke Matthews started an online furniture restoration business in 2017 and soon moved into a brick-and-mortar store called River City Relics, with a big selection of home décor, art and clothing. Sales were modest until they persuaded officials at lululemon, a fashionable apparel company, to join forces with them. “That’s a big brand that you won’t usually find in small towns and small stores,” Delvaux says. “But we kept working with them until it happened and it has been life-changing for us.”

Rita Houska stared selling jewelry and purses from the back of her father’s antique shop in 2007; she had her own store a year later. Today, she and her daughter Mandi stock two floors of surprises into one of Yankton’s many historic buildings. The basement ceiling is only 6 feet, 6 inches high, and the floor is wood planks, but no one minds because the inventory is one-of-a-kind, a blend of country and chic. You can buy everything from fine art and funky t-shirts to bread mixes that call for a can of beer and stylish cowhides ($275 for the biggest).

Carla Mueller runs Ninth Street Clothing on Second Street, near the scenic Riverside Field at Bob Tereshinski Stadium and its river view. She started the business in 2017 on Ninth Street at the edge of town (thus the name) and moved downtown in 2023 when she and her husband built a new building.

Carla Mueller (left) and Tracy Pravecek fashion summer hats at Ninth Street Clothing.

Mueller’s original location was an old, quaint building — like most of the independent stores in the neighborhood. She tried to incorporate some of that aura in the new store, with a vaulted ceiling and big windows that look out on the ballpark.

She loves the vibrancy of the downtown. “I can’t believe the number of young people who are going into business,” Mueller says. “They are invested in our community, and they are making it work. It’s a team thing. I love that it’s not a competition but a collaboration. If they can’t find something here, we point them to the other clothing stores, and I know they do the same.”

Ninth Street is the newest building and newest business downtown. The oldest is Boston Shoes to Boots, founded in 1915 and operated today by Mandi Gause and Brennan Ewald. The sisters bought the shoe store eight years ago. “Our dad pushed us into going in business for ourselves because he and Mom had worked demanding jobs, and always worked for ‘the man,’” says Mandi.

Their dad must be proud. Five years ago, they also bought a home décor store called Monta’s, renamed it Forte and have become young leaders of the loosely knit strip.

The downtown district also includes a small soap factory, an apothecary for holistic health, wedding venues, medicinal marijuana dispensaries, a ReStore shop run by local Habitat for Humanity volunteers and a new coffee shop called Muddy Mo’s, named for the ever-present river that flows a block away. (The coffee shop is operated by South Dakota Magazine.)

As downtown redevelopment happened, the Yankton Mall dwindled to near emptiness until 2023 when, ironically, a local entrepreneur named Matt Evans bought it from the giant Dial Enterprises of Omaha. Evans cleaned and aired out the cavernous mall, unlocked the doors and reopened the movie theater to much applause because it had been closed since the 2020 pandemic.

Evans has welcomed local shops, but he has 200,000 square feet to fill, so he is also recruiting chain stores. Thanks to support from the city commission — which has now voted twice to provide a sales tax rebate to assist with remodeling — Hobby Lobby, Five Below and Marshall’s plan to open before Christmas of 2025 and other announcements are expected.

In the 1980s, before the age of online shopping, there were more than 25,000 malls in the United States. Today there are only 1,000, and Capital One Research projects that the number could drop to 150 by 2032.

The Yankton Mall, and shopping centers like it, are now the underdogs of retailing. Meanwhile, Clatworthy and the other independent store owners are anxious to see whether a mall and a downtown can co-exist in a town of 15,000.

Neon lights still shine in Yankton, including at the historic Dakota Theater, built in 1902.

“It’s all unpredictable, we’ve learned that through the years,” she says. “There are fears based on past experiences and fear is dangerous. It’s natural but you don’t want to act on it. The chains are coming here because we have a market. Hopefully they do attract some new shoppers and if so then the market will grow for all of us.”

Carla Mueller of Ninth Street Clothing agrees. “We are all going to feel it initially when the big stores open, but then I think it’ll die down. In the end, they’ll bring new people to town and there will be two kinds of customers,” she says. “We are selling service as much as anything, and the bigger you get the harder it is to take care of the customer.”

Plus, Mueller says, it’s hard for a chain store or big box store to compete with the architecture, history and natural beauty of the river district.

Mandi Gause, the shoe store owner, agrees. “I believe we have one of the most beautiful backdrops a downtown could have, and it does make us unique.”

She’s also wondering about the return of the chain stores. “Early in our ownership, the previous owner told me there used to be several shoe stores downtown. I told him I was thankful that wasn’t the case anymore. His reply was blunt. ‘It’s better if there’s more competition because that means more people are in town looking for shoes.’”

That’s the very same optimistic and independent spirit that prompted Matt Evans to rehab an empty mall — and that shoppers seem to appreciate when they walk “The Strip” along the river. Yankton leaders are hoping that this time, everyone can coexist and grow together.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 by Hannah Schaefer — Leave a comment

Weekend Roundup!

Three ways to spend your weekend in South Dakota:

1. Honey Bee Festival at the Laurel Ridge Barn – Wedding & Events Venue in Sioux Falls, July 19. Sweet treats, live music and activities.

2. Farley Fest at Lake Farley Park in Milbank, July 19-20. Music, parade, cornhole tournament, inflatables, Q-Fest barbecue competition, art and food vendors.

3. Brulé at Outlaw Square in Deadwood, July 20. Free concert kicks off Deadwood’s Days of ’76 and is part of the historic mountain town’s 150th celebration.

For more events, visit www.southdakotamagazine.com/calendar-of-events

Posted on July 16, 2026July 16, 2026 by Stori Westphal — Leave a comment

A Celebration of South Dakota’s Diverse Cultures

Photos by Madelyn Glaze

We had a wonderful time at the 605 Unity Jam in Wagner. Something special about South Dakota is our pride of place and the celebration of the cultures that come together here; South Dakota really is a special place to be!

Photos by Madelyn Glaze

Check out our calendar of events for more fun festivals and gatherings!