Soldiers of the 147th Field Artillery Unit based in Yankton said they wouldn't consider their Iraq mission over until everyone gets home. Tomorrow, the last man will fly into the Chan Gurney Airport on the north edge of Yankton where he'll be greeted by his fellow soldiers, family, friends and perfect strangers.

Charlie Battery had tough going in Iraq. Four soldiers died and two, including Sgt. Cory Briest, were seriously injured. The other survivors returned last September, but they didn't consider the mission over until everyone gets back to South Dakota.

Cory, who suffered serious and permanent injuries including blindness and traumatic brain injuries from a roadside bombing, has been recuperating at Casa Colina in California. Meanwhile, the Yankton community has been raising funds to build him and his family a new handicapped accessible home on West Street. it won't quite be finished by tomorrow, so the Briests will return to their old home for a few weeks.

The plane is scheduled to arrive in Yankton between 3 and 4 p.m. Cory and his family will then proceed to the Summit Activities Center (the new high school west of the Yankton Mall), where he'll be awarded the Purple Heart.

Iraq will surely never be forgotten by Cory Briest or any of his fellow soldiers in Charlie Battery, but Saturday's homecoming will close a chapter in their lives.

We continue to send complimentary copies of South Dakota Magazine to soldiers overseas who have ties to South Dakota. If you have a friend or loved one in Iraq, Afghanistan or some other trouble spot, email their name and APO address to books@iw.net and we'll add him or her to our list.

We've quoted Archie Gilfillan, the late Harding County sheepherder & author, more than once. Remember when he said that there are more characters in the country than in the cities because people are like nuts -- if you roll them around together in one big hopper they all start to take on the same shape; but if you spread them out, as we do with people on the open country, they retain their original shape and character.

I was driving through the little burg of Onaka (in Faulk County, southwest of Aberdeen) and happened upon one of South Dakota's most colorful houses. It belongs to James Barondeau, a strapping fellow in striped overalls with a big black dog who runs Jim's Tire Repair out of a big shed in the back yard. He persuaded Linda Reisch of nearby Roscoe to paint the place. "All I wanted was two tractors," he said. "I told her she could paint whatever she wanted after that." So Linda painted dairy cows, space ships, giant royal frogs and other fancy stuff.

I wish Archie was alive to see that house.

Thursday's edition of the Argus Leader showed the best and the most bothersome side of South Dakota's biggest city.

The paper has stories about a new, smoke-free piano bar opening alongside Minerva's downtown, and about Whiffer's little sandwich shop on Minnesota Ave. (a staple for 30 years), and a festival of music and art by the Falls this weekend. Plus, there are reports on how Poet (formerly Broin Ethanol) hopes to make ethanol from corn and cobs. Poet is the Microsoft of agri-business, staffed by a bunch of bright farm kids. There's even a story about donkeys on the edge of town.

Then you turn to the "Voices" section and see continuing discussions on the homeless, conflicts of interest among the city's own, and a scathing letter from Richard Smith of Brookings on the arrogance of the city's ecnonomic development leadership. The latter discussion has been broiling since Dan Scott, president of the Sioux Falls Area Development Foundation, wise-cracked to a gathering of out-state legislators that, "If you can't be excited (about Sioux Falls' growth), I've got one request. Stay out of the way, will you? We've got a city to build."

Smith, who has also worked in economic develoment, points out that it wasn't the first time Sioux Falls leadership displayed such arrogance. "The real gorilla is not in Union County, it's Sioux Falls," he concluded.

While he certainly spoke (or wrote) for a lot of people -- and while it's fair to judge a person by what he says, especially someone in a powerful position -- our view is that you shouldn't judge an entire city by the words of one person.

We devoted an entire chapter to Sioux Falls in our new book, South Dakota Curiosities, because it obviously has become a major force in the Midwest, thanks largely to the growth of the USD medical school and the city's two hospitals, and to the credit card industry. And sometimes its growth seems to have come at the expense of nearby cities -- but if the growth hadn't happened there (bigger hospitals, mega-stores, etc.) it would have been in Sioux City, Omaha, Minneapolis or somewhere further down the road; so we're fortunate that our friends and family were able to find jobs in the state rather than 500 miles away.

In my lifetime of publishing and politicking, I can't say that Sioux Falls has been a bully. It may have a few bullies, like every town. But they don't run the town. In Curiosities we note, "The city doesn't overwhelm South Dakota politically. Its citizens vote much the same as their rural neighbors. Its legislators have grown in number, but they can hardly agree among themselves, so they haven't been a united force in Pierre., Culturally, the city isn't exactly the epicenter of prairie life, either. It has too much concrete, too many lights, and too much neon and noise. Too much success. South Dakota's identity is rooted in the bawdy Black Hills, the displaced Lakota and Dakota Indians, the struggling farmer and rancher and the plucky small towns."

We conclude in the book that the city is like a rich uncle, nice to have around but hardly a pushy bully.

Photo by Scott Howard

South Dakota Tourism's Scott Howard was at the right place at the right time last night when he got this shot of the capitol building. Scott's title is actually "video specialist" but it looks like the tourism office could capitalize on his photography skills also.

Fans and friends of retired KELO broadcaster Dave Dedrick (and there are tens of thousands) will enjoy Doug Lund's blog update today. Be sure to read it. For one thing, the longtime smoker has kicked the habit at age 80 or so.

I know that some of our readers have looked in vain for the granite stones that mark the border between the Dakotas. Apparently, along many miles of the border the markers have been removed for fireplace mantels or buried by erosion, perhaps, in the 1930s. Others simply have no roads in the vicinity. Some have been farmed around; others are rubbing posts for cows and deer.

I was driving a stretch of road between Ashley, N.D. and Eureka-Long Lake last week and found several of the markers, easily seen. I found it interesting that they read "SD" on the North Dakota side and "ND" on the North Dakota side -- as if to announce to people approaching on foot that they are about to enter ND or SD.

The 7' quartzite markers (with about 4' above ground) were spaced a half-mile apart, 720 in all between the Dakotas. Each weighs 800 pounds. The work began in 1891, and the workers used steamboats and horses and wagons to move the pillars to the border. They battled everything from mosquitoes to blizzards. The quartzite was mined at a quarry by Sioux Falls.

Similar markers exist along parts of our other three sides. However, North and South Dakota are the only two states in the nation to have markers along their entire border.

Our college intern Chris Vondracek is writing a Tuesday report for the Web site. Here are his latest thoughts:

I would’ve bought the tie whether the Celtic store’s proprietor spoke in an accent or not, but he seemed to enjoy doing it just the same. We asked the gentleman where he was from – guessing by his seemingly authentic accent that he had opened this shop in the Rapid City after emigrating to America as a young man.

But he answered in an entirely American way that he was from “here.” Wait, so you mean to say, your accent is just an act?

Our minds became woozy trying to decipher the man’s dual reality – here was an American, running an authentic Celtic store, speaking in a fake Celtic accent, wearing a kilt, complaining about the Rapid City internet service provider and reminiscing about his Scottish ancestors from a millennia ago as if he had just sat down for coffee and biscuits with them last week.

They say truth is stranger than fiction; as I’ve found on subsequent trips to the Black Hills, this is the delightful conundrum of a place where legends are so big you’d swear they were fake.

During my spring break, I happened into a Deadwood bar with sawdust floors and the obligatory photos of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. I say they’re obligatory because there is a theme park-essence to Deadwood, the same as in a make-believe saloon in Disney World where proprietors surely hang photos of Mickey Mouse and Goofy in cowboy hats.

But next to those famous Deadwood faces hung photos of turn-of-the-century baseball teams – the players looking like they’d just gotten off work at the gold mines. That’s because Deadwood isn’t a theme park, it’s a real place with real town heroes – some were local baseball players, others were famous dime-novel characters.

If you’re searching for the “truth” about Deadwood, it’s somewhere in between those two sets of photos – somewhere in between the interplay of myth and reality that consequently makes both seem a little more like the other.

Earlier this month, I drove around Savoy (not a big drive) in Spearfish Canyon following signposts that lead to where Kevin Costner pointed his cameras in “Dances With Wolves.” After driving obliviously past my third or fourth breathtaking cliff or waterfall, however, I realized I didn’t need Costner’s stamp of approval to verify that what I was looking at was beautiful. As much as I loved the film, Costner’s fiction at this point seemed less interesting than the truth staring me in the face.

Here’s what I’ve learned from the Black Hills so far: Storytellers make a living at showing the extraordinary within the ordinary. If I were ever going to search the world looking for a story, I would go to the Black Hills because there my work is nearly done. Plus, I already know a Celtic storeowner who makes an interesting character.

Yes, a thick and heavy brew of oil beneath the Canadian tundra is badly needed by American consumers – so badly needed that today six men in dark suits came to Yankton City Hall to explain why they need to dig a 1,800-mile trench and bury a pipe four feet in the ground, crossing roads and rivers and fields and swamps and whatever else might be in the way.

The S.D. Public Utilities Commission held the hearing – the first of four this week in eastern South Dakota. Another is tonight at 7 p.m. in Joe's Cafe at Alexandria. Tuesday they meet at the Clark Community Center at 7 p.m. Wednesday they'll be at the Marshall County Community Building in Britton at noon.

One of the first things the "suits" from Keystone, the pipeline firm, explained at the Yankton meeting was that the brainstorm of having the pipeline follow the I-29 corridor sounds good at first. They evaluated the idea, but the interstate's 120 interchanges and overpassess in South Dakota alone are a detriment. Plus, they explained that a lot of development has occurred on that corridor and they try to stay away from development.

Furthermore, the best place to cross the Mighty Missouri is at Yankton, where the banks are most stable and the channel is narrowest.

The Keystone officials noted that they are "the truckers," meaning they don't own the wells or the refinery but simply move the product from one to the other. They have been in the business for 50 years and have 36,500 miles of pipeline in the ground today.

They said refineries are hungry for the oil -- so hungry that they will sign 18 and 20-year contracts. Apparently, they don't think oil is going to be replaced by wind, solar, nuclear or ethanol any time soon. They said the proposed Elk Point refinery has absolutely no connection to the Keystone pipeline.

And they repeated again and again .... and again ... that Keystone will be a good neighbor, during and after the construction process. They will not tolerate any reports of their people treating landowners unfairly, disrepectfully or "in any strong-handed manner."

Dusty Johnson, the PUC chair, said the hearings are just the beginning of the process and not the end. He emphasized that there is plenty of time for public input and discussion and he said the PUC welcomes comments in any manner. However, he noted that the PUC decision is based solely on what's good for the health, safety and welfare of the region. They do not have jurisdiction over landowner/pipeline relations.