The Gift of South Dakota
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Too Many Counties?
May 5, 2015
... wooden cross.
The town’s VFW Hall boasts a new 5-by-10-foot painting by Menno airbrush artist Mickey Harris that honors a local World War II veteran. Leon Woehl was aboard a B-17 that crashed in Germany in 1944. Harris’ painting depicts the crash and the Nazi soldiers looking for Woehl and the eight other crewmembers who hid in the woods until their capture.
Springfield sits right on the Missouri ...
Russia's Gift to the Dakotas?
October 7, 2014
... be referring to when he delivers his paper, "Russia's Gift to the Dakotas," at the 22nd annual West River History Conference set for Oct. 16-18 in Rapid City.
I would guess that it will refer to the Germans-from-Russia emigration to the Dakotas. But I could be mistaken. That's the great thing about the West River History Conference. It sets the record straight on all sorts of topics that we don't spend ...
Æbleskiver for All
July 15, 2014
... heritage all over the world. During the Dakota Boom (1878-1887), European and Asian immigrants flooded Dakota Territory, creating a checkerboard of ethnic settlements. Danes homesteaded in Turner County, Germans in Hutchinson and McPherson counties, Finns in Hamlin County and Czechs in Bon Homme and Yankton counties.
Many small towns celebrate our state’s diverse heritage with annual festivals. Viborg’s ...
Grace Balloch’s Books
July 2, 2014
... abroad. In France they would face some of the harshest conditions in wartime history, encountering poison gases fashioned into weaponry, and fighting from trenches where disease killed just as ruthlessly as German bullets.
Grace told her husband she was sailing to France to support American boys in the trenches. She knew that the YMCA needed volunteers to staff canteens and “huts” near the front lines. ...
Searching for the "Oldest"
June 18, 2014
... arched-roof cellar where Hutterite women store hundreds of gallon jars of fruits and vegetables.
Among the oldest West River ranches is the Landers’ operation in Fall River County. William Landers, a German immigrant and mason, homesteaded the land in 1885, and the men and women of the Landers family have raised cattle there ever since. "He was a progressive rancher," his grandson, Tom, told us in 1999. ...
A World War I Primer
May 6, 2014
... enlist. He spent time as a wrestler with a traveling carnival, but the next year he made his way into the Army. He became a military policeman, and after the war, as he escorted former prisoners back to Germany, he happened upon a man with a tiny black mustache speaking on a street corner. Adolf Hitler was then a leader in the National Socialist German Workers Party. “He seemed so dangerous,” ...
Gas, Pop, Eggs ... and 1,000 Guns
... replied Curt. He has a good word for all who enter, including both the locals who buy milk and beer and fuel, or the visitors from afar who come to see the guns.
Equally friendly are two large, black German short hairs that roam the shop, Joe and Speck. "Joe is the best young dog we've come up with," says Curt matter-of-factly. Speck doesn't seem offended. Curt and his wife live in the back of the store. ...
Deconstructing Christiegate
January 15, 2014
... anyway? Neither do I know whether President Obama didn’t know that his own Justice Department was delivering weapons to Mexican drug gangs or that his own National Security Agency was spying on the German Chancellor or that the ObamaCare website was as seaworthy as a tea strainer on the day he launched it. I prefer to believe that he is lying because if he is not, then no one is in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania ...
The Affordable Care Act vs Religious Freedom
December 2, 2013
... least some rights, if they exist at all. For these reasons it makes no sense to question whether corporations are persons in a legal sense. Of course they are.
The second reason why the question is not germane to the Hobby Lobby complaint is that the Hobby Lobby owners can just as easily claim their rights as individuals under the First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion. The Hobby Lobby managers are persons ...
Statehood Began With a Turkey Dinner
November 26, 2013
... outraged and responded by sending 188 delegates to another convention at Huron in June 1883. Again, they demanded a constitutional convention to be held in Sioux Falls in September. Delegates gathered at Germania Hall drafted a constitution and presented it to the people, who approved it 12,336-6,814 in the November 1883 election. A newly appointed executive committee traveled to Washington and presented the ...
Obama's Scarlet Sound Bite
November 7, 2013
... seized the records of the Associated Press when the rest of us read it in the newspapers. He had no idea that the IRS was targeting conservative groups or that the National Security Agency was spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. So if the words he used to describe his own healthcare policy were manifestly fraudulent, well, how would he know?
But surely he knows now. Yet he said this only ...
Leaving Her South Dakota Nest
August 7, 2013
... of firearms and the outdoors. Even in our only metropolitan area, Sioux Falls, while the complexion of the residents has been changing, the perspective hasn’t — be they Norwegian, Lakota, German or Sudanese, they are pretty comfortable knowing that they have created a community of safe homes, neighborhoods and schools.
But out there — outside the 5-7 — I’m not so ...
When the Feathers Hit the Fan
July 1, 2013
... thing, they usually commit to ignoring everything else.
The birds and the bats are not the only ones who will suffer from energy policies driven by pretty ideas. In his speech, the President praised Germany for “going all out in the race for clean energy.” One of the results of that all-out rush is that German households pay about three times as much for a month of power as their American counterparts. ...
King of Klub
March 4, 2013
... huge dumplings simmered in ham broth have raised funds for the local fire department and for youth groups at American Lutheran Church.
Mathiason learned to make klub at his mother’s knee. She was German and Irish, but picked up the technique from her mother-in-law in order to please her full-blooded Norwegian husband. “He liked potato klub, lefse, lutefisk, all the goodies,” says Al.
It’s ...
Menno's Open Door
By Katie Hunhoff
Bored with the homogenization of America’s restaurants? You’ll find culinary and cultural relief at the Open Door in Menno, where Rita Hoff has been serving German and farm country specialties since 1986.
Menno, a town of 780 in Hutchinson County, was settled by Germans from Russia. “We started getting requests for the foods we all grew up with,” Hoff ...
The Head Cheese
January 13, 2013
... in Hosmer had been nice enough to send John Andrews (no relation) a box of delicious meats in appreciation for the article he’d written for our November/December issue about the cuisine of Germans from Russia enjoyed in Hosmer, Eureka and other places around the state. When I eyed the head cheese, John was kind enough to share. I was eager to try it. I remembered Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about ...
Picture-Perfect Cookies
December 20, 2012
Enjoying springerle, an old German holiday treat, is a Christmas tradition for the Bensons of Brookings.
One Contentious Cookie
December 6, 2012
... below, and her Aunt Marilyn has promised to send another once she tracks it down. Grandma Maridell's version was different yet. Please feel free to share your family's version in the comments section.
The Germans and the Dutch also have variations on this cookie theme, pfeffernusse and pepernoten. The Danes call them pebernødder. Some recipes make a cookie so hard that they must be dunked in coffee to ...
South Dakota Web Roundup
October 5, 2012
... your sense of direction? Test it out at a local corn maze. Heartland Country's is open through October 31. (There's a cheat sheet for it here.
For some, October means adult beverages, polka music and German food. If that's more your style, check out Deadwood’s Oktoberfest and Bierborse in Rapid City.
