Violent clouds. That seems like an oxymoron if you have never suffered storm damage. But people who have suffered them understand the terminology.

Clouds are not always puffy and pretty. They've done untold damage to people, property and trees, and last night southeast South Dakota was threatened once again.

Pictured here are the dark skies of Yankton County, where high winds and sheets of rain sent most people running for cover. But most of the damage happened northeast of here, in Turner and Clay counties.

We checked our weather calendar for trivia on end-of-May events. What a variety. A hard frost occurred May 26, 1992. Seventeen inches of rain fell at Avon on May 30-. A record 104 degrees was reported in Sioux Falls on May 30.

You know what they say: if you don't like the weather in South Dakota then .....

Pulitizer prize winning writer Timothy Egan has a good commentary in today's New York Times about the loss of wilderness on America's great prairie. His piece doesn't mention South Dakota, but it is relevant and some of the many interesting comments below his essay do reflect directly on the Dakotas.

This is an issue John Milton thought and wrote about ... not Milton the English poet, but Milton the English prof at the University of South Dakota. In his book South Dakota he noted that nowhere is the earth and sky so close and so important to peoples' lives as the wide open prairies of South Dakota.

And we've always loved the lyrics of Wessington Springs' late great troubadour Kyle Evans, who wrote and sang:

I'm in heaven on a horse on the wide open prairies of Dakota,
Where life sings me a melody and my heart sings in harmony,
My troubles never been so few before.

Our magazine writers have focused a lot in recent years on locally-grown foods, and now other media are now picking up on the subject, especially with today's rising food prices. So I thought we had recognized and established a trend in food writing until I received an email from our friend Ron Backer, a California artist with strong ties to Turner County, South Dakota.

A few years back, Ron painted a series of paintings that depict early-day Sioux Falls. He sent us a copy of one by email. It is titled "Farmers Market" and it shows an open air produce market that opened July 13, 1912, at 13th and Phillips Avenue. He says it did a brisk business, and provided opportunities for city and rural folks to mingle.

So maybe we're not setting a trend.

But the fact remains that growing, selling, buying and consuming food grown close to home are probably some of the best activities you can do for your health, for your local economy and for the global energy debacle.

I recently read on the Prairie Roots blog about a Maine study which indicates that shifting just one percent of consumer expenditures to direct purchasing of local food products can increase farmers' income by five percent. The study said if every Maine resident spent just $10 a week on local foods, $100 million would be invested back into farmers' pockets each growing season.

"Buy Fresh Buy Local" chapters are sprouting across South Dakota and the nation. This is a sleeper issue that gets treated as quaint and cute by the Big Media, but we sense that families are becoming uneasy about not just the cost but the quality of their groceries. The new farm bill is going to add teeth to country-of-origin meat labeling laws, and that is likely to open more peoples' eyes.

Farmers Markets are just beginning to open for the season in many South Dakota communities. Let's encourage the trend with our pocketbooks.

Much was made last weekend — and appropriately so — of the great sacrifices made by our veterans of wars past and present.

By coincidence I was invited last week to attend the local Sons of Norway gathering. That is quite an honor for a Bohemian-American like myself and I enjoyed it immensely, the good company and the delicious desserts that were as tasty as kolaches.

Earl Reese, the president of the organization, loaned me a book titled "Some Pioneers and Pilgrims on the Prairies of Dakota." Written in 1918 by his grandfather, Rev. John Reese of Mitchell, the book relates sacrifices also made by the men, women and children who came from overseas — leaving "home, friends and the graves of a hundred generations of ancestors" — and painstakingly carved out a new culture here on the Northern Plains. "Like Moses, most of them died without themselves enjoying the fruits of the land or seeing the promise fulfilled," wrote Rev. Reese.

He lamented that the young people of his generation seemed to lack appreciation for the hard toil, the heartaches and tragedies "which were the price paid by our fathers and mothers for our better future."

He noted that so-called original Americans (and he wasn't writing of the Native Americans) would "sneer at the immigrant, to affect certain superior 'airs' in relation to him. This self-appointed superiority, however, did not seem to bar them from taking undue advantage of him because of his lack of knowledge of the new country and its ways and methods. How little this class of self-appointed Americans were capable of understanding, not to speak of appreciating, the physical and mental contribution, not to speak of the moral and spiritual — the soul — which these immigrants brought to the land of their adoption."

We have many good prairie museums dedicated to collecting the tools and toys of the pioneers, but I must admit that I haven't visited one that truly exhibited the story of the pioneer experience as outlined by Rev. Reese. A museum that did so would be doing a great service for the today generation.

All who sacrificed for America — veterans, suffragettes, civil rights leaders, immigrants and countless others — should be remembered, not for their own good but for ours.

Turnabouts have long been popular in European cities like London and Paris, but South Dakota also has one that is very attractive. Guess where it is and you'll win a free copy of John Front's photo collection titled "South Dakota Farmscapes."

The photo was taken by Dave Tunge of Dakota Aerials. You'll like his Web site.

To submit your guess, just hit "comments" below. We are too weary from the long holiday weekend to think of any rules, so anything is fair. The first correct guess wins the book.

We met photographer John Front in 2004. He was a quiet man, and unassuming. We met with him to see if he would consider working with us on a book of his photographs, and as we talked his passion for photography overcame his humble demeanor. The next year we published South Dakota Farmscapes, the photography of John Front .

Front passed away this week at the age of 90. He left behind thousands of photographs he took while roaming the prairie surrounding his home town. Front grew up in Marshall County and worked for the Thorpe Ranch until he left to serve in WWII. He re-enlisted after the war, serving with the U.S. Army for 20 years, and then renturning home.

With an army pension, and no wife or family to help him spend it, John settled into a simple lifestyle in Britton. He spent his money on cameras and photography equipment, and walked the country roads of his youth with his Nikon. He amassed a collection of about 3,000 slides.

John's passion for photography went hand in hand with his passion for interpreting the beauty of farm country. While putting together his book, we thought it would be most fitting to match his photos with writing from prairie authors. One poem we used was from Badger Clark, our state's first poet laureate. It could have been written about John Front.

Men of the older, gentler soil,
Loving the things that their fathers wrought,
Worn old fields of their father's toil,
Scarred old hills where their fathers fought—
Loving their land for each ancient trace,
Like a mother dear for her wrinkled face,
Such as they never can understand
The way we have loved you, young, young land!

Pierre native Eddie Welch has sent us a copy of an interesting magazine called Red Ink. Published by students and grad students at the University of Arizona, it publishes Native American art and writing. Very nicely done. Visit the magazine's Web site for more information.

The Spring 2008 issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Oscar Howe's letter to the Philbrook Art Center. I must admit that the letter is news to me; it is very powerful. According to the Red Ink editors, Howe was rejected for a prize at the annual Indian Painting Exhibition at Tulsa, Okla., because his watercolors were not considered "traditional Indian art."
Howe, then age 43, responded accordingly:

Whoever said that my paintings are not traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art, indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. There is also power and strength and individualism and intellectual insight in the old Indian paintings.

Every bit in my paintings is a true, studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him. Now even in Art.

You little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different. Well I am not going to stand for it. Indian art can compete with any art in the world, but not as a suppressed art. I see so much of the mismanagement and mistreatment of my people. It makes me cry inside to look at these poor people. My father died here about three years ago in a little shack, my two brothers still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing, treated as second class citizens. This is one of the reasons I have tried to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive, but one could easily become a social protest painter. I only hope the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.

You might say that Wild Bill Hickok gave his very life for South Dakota tourism. Not willingly, of course. But his death during a Deadwood poker game on August 2, 1876, has grown to become one of the signature events in our Old West culture.

Hickok surely would have preferred to live out his life in peace. He had already been a Union soldier, stage coach guard, lawman, gambler and actor when he died at the age of 39. But he'd lived long enough to know the value of good promotion, and though he apparently made up a few stories in his day, he could never have imagined that he might be an icon of the West in the year 2008.

The legend continues this summer in Yankton, the city that tried Jack McCall for Hickok's murder and then hung him north of town. The Dakota Territorial Museum has created a six-panel exhibit of Hickok and McCal, for display all summer. This Saturday (May 24), the exhibit will also feature Wild Bill's gun and holster from noon to 4 p.m. only.

Yankton wears its history well. Locals can still point to the building where McCall was tried, and to the old courthouse and jail where he was kept while awaiting trial. His grave site is in the Catholic cemetery, but the exact location has been kept private because Yanktonians don't want to encounter tourists from Berlin or Tokoyo while they're putting flowers on grandma's grave.

Our Chamber of Commerce once had a big billboard along Highway 81 that read, "We Haven't Hung Anyone Since Jack McCall." But the powers-that-be decided it was not a friendly greeting, so it was replaced by something bland.

Yankton and Deadwood are 400 miles apart, yet they share as much history and culture as any two cities in the Dakotas — thanks in part to the untimely demise of Wild Bill.