Cowboy Hill in Rapid City

You might have seen the giant letters near Vermillion (USD), near the School of Mines campus in Rapid City and by Spearfish. A big "C" is also on a hill above Chadron State College in Nebraska, just south of the Pine Ridge Reservation. I wasn't aware that such markings are fairly common throughout the West, and quite rare in other parts of the world.

A new book titled Hillside Letters: A to Z tells the stories of the letters. The author, Evelyn Corning, found them from Arizona to Texas. She missed the Vermillion site, but did a nice job on the "H" which represents Black Hills State University. The school hired three students to construct it in 1956. They used handcarts to get the concrete to the top of the Lookout Mountain. Freshmen used to whitewash it, sliding around it with their bodies, as a Swarm Day activity. But in the 1970s they used the wrong kind of lime and over 100 students received chemical burns. That stopped the whitewashing.

The SMD on Cowboy Hill near the School of Mines campus in Rapid City is much older. The college declared a school holiday in October of 1912 to give 65 students and 10 faculty the time to lay out the M. They used picks, shovels and horse-drawn plows. Townspeople watched from down below with spyglasses, opera glasses and binoculars. The photo above shows students carrying a barrel of whitewash up the hill. The S and D were added in 1953.

Cowboy Hill was sold for development last year but the SMD and a greenspace around it will be preserved.

Want to hear South Dakota Magazine Editor Bernie Hunhoff hemming and hawing and stammering through a half-hour radio interview on USD Professor Mike Myer's radio show, "ElderLaw Forum"?

Here's a link to a web site that has stored it for posterity on the web. It may take a minute to load up or whatever it does.

Mike and I talk about how South Dakotans differ somewhat from people in other regions of the country. I think we're smarter and better looking.

Here's a pair of photos bound to make any farm kid shudder. Remember how hard it was to pull a B John Deere or a Ford Jubilee out of the mud? Today's machinery will plow through more mud, but when you start to feel that sinking sensation you are in serious trouble. You and the neighbor probably won't get it out with his 45-horse M Farmall.

These pictures are making the rounds on the web. They are supposedly from a field by Humboldt in Minnehaha County. Word is that it took 24 hours, 4 tractors, 6 broken chains, 3 snapped tow straps, and 1 backhoe to reverse course.

From my perspective, I just hope dad was driving and not some 14-year-old. And I'm darn glad everybody didn't have camera phones and web sites when we were farming. We would have been the most photographed farm on the Worldwide Web.

The Wall Street Journal has a story on the "gorilla" development at Elk Point. Their writer put our local media to shame, uncovering much more information and some colorful anecdotes along the way. Here's an excerpt.

Jim Cody, the owner of the town steakhouse, spent much of the past six months at home with a lung hernia, and used his time to dig deeper. Each time he heard a clue, he hit the Internet with his six-year-old Gateway computer to check it out.

"It could be an oil refinery and a petrochemical plant," says Mr. Cody, 65. To explain his theory, he sketches a map on a white notepad showing how the company behind the Gorilla has bought land options in two separate sites in Elk Point, one plot near the Missouri River and another larger site close to Interstate 29. Then he slides a glossy ConocoPhillips corporate publication across the table and points to a page detailing an oil refinery in Roxana, Ill. "I went on Google," he says, and looked at a satellite image of the refinery. "It looks just like Elk Point."

A ConocoPhillips spokesman said he was unaware of the company pursuing a project in South Dakota.

Mr. Cody compares notes with fellow sleuth John W. Curry, an 85-year-old World War II veteran. On a recent morning, Mr. Curry dropped by Mr. Cody's Western-themed restaurant, Cody's Homestead, and unfurled a wrinkled map of Union County (population: 12,500) that shows each section of farmland.

Mr. Curry pointed to about a dozen plots he'd colored with green or yellow markers. "Those are the people that have sold options," he said. "The black and blue are ones I think will sell."

Tensions are rising. Some residents worry about changes to their placid town, and others fear the worst -- that the project could entail a process that carries potential health or environmental risks, such as a nuclear power plant.

Several residents have formed a grass-roots, anti-Gorilla group called the Citizens for Union County Committee. It is calling for residents not to sell land unless the project's specifics are unveiled. Member Burdette Hanson, 84, who's been farming since he was 17, says he has rebuffed offers on more than 1,000 acres of his family's land, potentially disrupting the project. "I'm not for sale," he declared over strawberry pie and iced tea at the home of friend Dale Harkness, who's fighting the project with him. "You can't buy happiness."

Mayor Shaw

The Rapid City Journal story this week on that city's mayoral race has an interesting quote by the incumbent Jim Shaw, who charges that a "massive, menacing monster" of negativity is attacking the community.

"It's always been there, lurking, usually afraid to come out from where it lives in the sinister shadows of uncertainty, under the heavy rock of misinformation, around the corner of half-truths and innuendo," he said.

Shaw said in the perfect storm of "white-hot local politics of personal ambition and secret agendas" the evil voice of negativity has reared its head. He said it's not about a difference of opinion, but the politics of personal destruction. "A future of fear and stagnation, doom and gloom. Or do you want a future like I do, filled with hope and optimism and respect for one another?" he asked.

Whooaa. I think I'd be scared not to vote for him. Both city and county commissioners in Yankton have been lamenting the same thing, but not with quite the colorful phrasing of Shaw, who is a former broadcaster. I wonder if such feelings exist in other South Dakota municipalities.

Personally, things seem about the same as ever from my perspective. I think it was Aristotle who once said that no political career ends well. Are the negative feelings in Rapid City and Yankton confined to frustrated city leaders in those two cities, or are things really so bad?

Last week, South Dakotans suffered from an ugly reminder of child cruelty. Next Monday people will gather around a little grave six miles east of Clark in an annual reminder of humanity at its kindest.

The story begins in 1888 when a tough-as-nails railroad brakeman known as Big Bill Chambers came to Clark County to do some repair work. He befriended a sickly little boy who loved trains. His parents ran the kitchen for the construction crew. Big Bill told the boy about America's big cities and his adventures as a railroader.

Sadly, the boy died. The devastated parents had to move onto the next town and leave the boy in a lonely grave on the wild prairie. Big Bill promised them that he would always keep an eye on the grave in his travels. He did better than that. As he advanced in his career -- first as freight conductor and then as passenger conductor -- he enlisted section crews to keep the grass and weeds away from the grave. Someone put up a permanent boulder. Even after Big Bill retired, he still visited the grave on Memorial Day until his death in 1939. For years after that, his son-in-law, conductor Vince Ford, took on the responsibility. For more than six decades, the Chicago & Northwestern Train 106 stopped on the prairie at the gravesite. Passengers waited and wondered as the train crew stepped out onto the grass and said a silent prayer.

For many years now, the Clark Rotary Club has arranged a Memorial Day visit to Little Fellow's Grave. I'm sure you'd be welcome.

Clark is a half-hour's drive west of Watertown on Highway 212. Our thanks to Warren Rockenbach of Center, N.D., who just mailed us a faded yellow 1947 newspaper clipping about the grave. It had information we hadn't seen before.

Today I had a lengthy phone conversation with George Ruble, a South Dakota Magazine reader from Orangeville, Calif. He is now 95 -- and as a young man he was sitting atop the Stratobowl south of Rapid City on July 28, 1934, watching the first Stratosphere flight rise over the Black Hills. He recalls it as an amazing sight. "It looked like a thousand gas tanks, about 8 inches in diameter and 4 to 5 feet long -- around the balloon." It sailed to 60,000 feet before the fabric ripped and the balloon crashed in a field near Holdrege, Nebraska. He intends to send us more information and some old photos.

George grew up in Ravinia "on an old Waterloo tractor" and later became a pilot. He trained WWII pilots in Missouri. He has been in California for many years, but is an avid reader of the magazine and has many relatives here. An old Ravinia school chum, Dorothy Crakes Roggie of Rapid City, introduced him to the magazine. He has a 98-year-old sister in Sioiux Falls (Alice Smith).

George says they recently took away his pilot's license and he just can't imagine why. Still, he finds things to occupy his days. He is now working on getting a patent for a space-saving device in kitchens.

The loss of his license reminds me of when the Pierre police told our old friend, the Bad River hermit Beryle Seaman, that he couldn't drive his old truck into Pierre anymore. I was in the legislature then. A few days later the PIerre Chief of Police came to our committee asking for something. I quizzed him about Berlye's problem.

"He says you won't let him drive in Pierre, and he says all he did was hesitate at a red light?" I said in my most serious senatorial tone.

"Well, yes, that's true," said the Police Chief politely, not wanting to lose my vote. "But he was driving the wrong direction when he hesitated."

I doubt that Berlye's story applies to George's flying.

The WHATIZZIT question for today (see two posts below this) was about a square inch or so of the shell of this snapping turtle, which we found on the center line of Highway 46 near Scotland and Menno three Sundays ago, the morning after the big storm and flood. He must have been pushed out of his normal habitat by rushing waters. I cautiously prodded him to the side of the road, and then he posed for pictures. The shell pattern really is quite interesting.