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A father/daughter effort to show Harding County's Finnish heritage.

Axel Sacrison was the son of Finnish immigrants who came to South Dakota in 1899 to work at Homestake Gold Mine. After a mine strike in 1911, the Sacrisons and several other families from Finland decided to escape the dark mine for a sunny homestead in Harding County.

Sacrison liked to draw and carve even as a boy. He painted his first picture at age 38 when his wife added a $1 set of oil paints to her wallpaper order. Charles Russell pictures from a wall calendar were his initial inspiration, but he soon looked outdoors at his own world. He worked as a rancher, truck driver and blacksmith by day; after hours, he became a prolific painter of prairie landscapes.

"Sometimes when I went to bed he was painting," says the artist's daughter, Willo Boe, "and he would be painting when I got up in the morning. I grew up with the smell of oil paint in my nostrils. I still love the smell. It was the smell of home."

Framed canvasses with wet paint were always drying on the walls of the Sacrison family's modest home in Buffalo. Once the paint hardened, Willo's father sold his pictures, gave them away or found a place to show them. He exhibited the largest canvasses at the Legion Theater. Bartenders at the Buffalo Bar welcomed his cowboy scenes. Rev. Jack Hill, the pastor of Cave Hills Lutheran Church, liked the painting of a bison that was hanging in the local bar. Willo remembers that her dad retrieved it and scrubbed it thoroughly with a brush and soap before presenting it to the pastor.

Sacrison drove a Standard Oil delivery truck from Buffalo to Belle Fourche for several years. Willo rode along on many occasions. "We would observe every single thing the eye could see," she says. "He would ask me to name the colors of the horizon as we drove down Highway 85. And he would whistle classical music. We could get the New York Philharmonic on a Bismarck radio station on Sundays, and he loved the songs."

The artist and his wife, Lillian, had two baby boys, but both died in infancy and were buried at the Cave Hills Cemetery. Lillian encouraged her husband's creativity. She gave unsolicited critiques of almost every work, pointing to strengths and shortcomings in the paintings.

Willo, their only surviving child, left Buffalo to attend college in Sioux Falls. But her dad's friendship, and his art, followed. "He was a letter writer. He wrote me twice a week, and he would usually paint a picture of birds or butterflies on the letterhead in watercolor. That meant so much to me."

Her father painted about 500 pictures, continuing almost until the day he died at age 67 in 1966. He was so prolific that he sometimes forgot his own art. He once saw a painting across a room and greatly admired it; and when he stepped closer did he discover that he had painted it.

Most of his pictures depict Harding County's great outdoors. The Cave Hills country north of Buffalo, where his parents homesteaded, was his backdrop for sheepherders, cattlemen, sportsmen and wildlife. But Sacrison also painted the Slim Buttes, the Little Missouri River valley, Castle Rock, Bear Butte and other regional landmarks. Ranch families often asked him to paint their family homesteads.

He painted biblical scenes for two years after Willo left home, and told the Rapid City Journal in 1955 that his picture of the crucifixion was among his best efforts. He did portraits of Indians and old settlers. He even carved figures in the sandstone buttes – hand prints, a lamb, his initials JAS and an eagle, still visible atop Thumb Butte.

Sacrison was also a capable writer; in the 1960s he handwrote a 60-page essay on the Finnish settlers in Harding County. Just as he never embellished his prairie landscapes, he didn't sugarcoat his ancestors' and neighbors' history. The Finnish males were strict with women and children. Child's play was discouraged because, "they figured it eventually led to gambling."

He seemed especially troubled by the Finns' treatment of women. "They were to do all the dirty work, take care of all the milking and the milk, keep house, do all cooking, help out in hay fields and gardens," he wrote. "Some old men figured the women just had to wait on their old man like a king."

He wrote of sheepherders who castrated tiny lambs with their teeth, superstitious cowboys who fired at a mysterious light by the Grand River ("shot it full of holes"), tricksters who put a piece of cactus between a friend's saddle blanket and saddle so they could watch a bucking horse, and men who practiced blood-letting as a "sure cure" for aches and pains.

Though he exposed myths and mistaken ideas, Sacrison was obviously proud of the settlers and their ability to adapt in America. He wrote of the men's pranks, alcohol-free dances in a country dance hall at the base of Thumb Butte and the love of sharing a pot of coffee. "When visitors came, the coffee table would have sweet breads and cookies or cake, and a special treat was a cheese made out of whole milk run by rennet tablets and baked in the oven. When eating, the cheese sounded like so much rubber was being chewed. It had a squeak of its own. Some folks called the cheese ‘rubber pie.'"

Willo married Bryce Boe, a boy she had met at a Little Ten Conference basketball tournament. Bryce attended high school in Vale, east of Belle Fourche in Butte County.

Throughout 52 years of marriage, they've regularly returned to northwest South Dakota. In recent years, they collected her dad's paintings, drawings and writings – along with many old photographs of his era – and compiled a book, Artist and Blacksmith: Axel Sacrison.

The 140 pp. book features full-color reproductions of more than a 100 Sacrison paintings – including the Harding County landscapes, samplings of his religious art and a few of his character studies, including an old, bearded Finnish settler smoking a pipe and a Lakota hunter.

Even if Alex Sacrison had never picked up a painter's brush, he and his Finnish contemporaries warranted a book. However, his art uniquely illustrates the immigrant families' love of their new land better than any amount of words and photos. Artist and Blacksmith is also a testimonial to a beautiful father/daughter relationship, one that continued long after the father was laid to rest in the Cave Hills Cemetery, high on the buttes he loved to paint.

Buy the May-June 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine to get this article with all photos and other stories in this issue.

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