Tootsie the Coyote, a Black Hills Mascot

Fred Borsch holds Tootsie during Deadwood's 1950 "Days of '76" Parade (South Dakota Public Broadcasting).

 

My boyhood in the Black Hills slightly overlapped the life of Tootsie, a famous South Dakota coyote. I must have gone past The Spot liquor store on visits to Deadwood, but I don't remember it. Dad probably never took me inside. (But can I time-travel back and make an offer on the Willys "woody" station wagon in the photograph?)

I could not find any of Tootsie and Fred's vocal duets (see article) on YouTube, but there was a bit of silent home movie from the late 1950s showing Tootsie and, apparently, Fred's tame deer at Galena, S.D.  (The Sheridan Lake footage is from elsewhere in the Black Hills.)

I wonder if she made any parade appearances in Rapid City.

The bounty on coyotes was real. "In 1947 and other years, there was a bounty on coyotes. The State of South Dakota considered them to be a predatory animal and a threat to livestock." 

Dad used to buy eggs from an old trapper named Frank Schmidt, who lived in the northern Hills.  It was not so much about getting organic free-range eggs as it was that Frank was a "character," and Dad collected "characters." 

There were usually skinned coyotes hanging up, because Frank eked out his modest living partly off those bounties. And he must have had a buyer for the pelts.

Sometimes he stopped by our house in Rapid to drop off eggs. His rattly pickup truck apparently stank of predator, because our dogs would bark at it like they barked at no other vehicle.

Retrievers and Me (1): The Retriever Who Did Not Retrieve

A boy with a shotgun that shot only corks, and a Labrador retriever who did not retrieve.

The yellow Lab's name was Misty. Dad got her cheap. She had been bred several times. He thought she might make a hunting dog. He was wrong. In his phrase, "She wouldn't retrieve hamburger."

He tried to train her, but Misty was just not interested. Maybe he was too impatient. Who knows?

On the other hand, she was sweet-tempered and never harmed anyone. She was an outdoor dog — Dad bought a set of plans and some sheets of plywood and built her that two-roomed doghouse, which was placed on the south side of the house with the inner room generously piled with straw — and she spent South Dakota winters out there. One summer she wandered off, and despite all the searching, was never found again.

The boy, well, he didn't know anything. When Misty followed him to school during first grade, he dragged her home again, then arrived at his classroom crying because he was tardy and embarassed.

The next year, Misty was replaced by Fritz the dachshund, litttermate of Dad's buddy's dog, who for some reason needed a home. Fifteen pounds of dog, but he weighed about sixty pounds in his own mind — which got him into trouble once or twice.

Nevertheless, Fritz went small-game hunting, camping, and backpacking. The month before the boy went off to college in Oregon, Fritz suffered a heart attack or something on a camping trip and never fully recoverered. After an interval, his condition worsened and he had to be put down; the boy never saw him again.

But he knew where Fritz's grave was on the Pike National Forest and visited it occasionally in future years. 

Part 2: "A Professional Golden Retriever"

What's Wrong with Arbor Day?

Born in southern Colorado, I spent much of my childhood in South Dakota, living where the Black Hills met the prairie. When it came to trees, the ethos was Trees Are Good — Absence of Trees is Bad. 

One Arbor Day we pupils at Canyon Lake Elementary School in Rapid City were herded out on the front lawn to watch a tree-planting. As best I can tell from Google Maps, that tree is still there, although its top looks a little drought-damaged.

Two hours south of Rapid City is Chadron, Nebraska, gateway to the Nebraska National Forest, "the largest hand-planted forest in the U.S." Not-coincidentally, the first Arbor Day in America was held in Nebraska and marked by massive tree-plantings throughout that state.

President Theodore Roosevelt thought that Arbor Day was a splendid idea and issued a national proclamation to that effect in 1907.

Trees Are Good, right? Or as the bumper sticker has it, "Trees Are The Answer."

Yet even in Nebraska, not everyone thinks so.

Chris Helzer, who is the Nature Conservancy’s director of science in Nebraska, speaks out against the Trees Are Good attitude beyond Arbor Day, when it affects prairie ecologies, in a blog post titled "The Darker Side of Tree Planting in the Great Plains."

Euro-American cultural attitudes, once again, collided with ecological realities, he writes,

In 1907, a combination of those [western Nebraska] tree plantations was designated as the Nebraska National Forest, something many Nebraskans were and are proud of.  I’ve always seen that whole process as a kind of sad appeal for respect (‘See, we DO have forests in Nebraska!’)  It’s like an accomplished and popular actor, musician, and philanthropist feeling inferior their whole life because they’re not good at basketball – and repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) trying out for teams. . . .

We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to get the public to support prairie conservation. Tree planting isn’t the problem, and neither are the people and organizations who advocate for it. Trees are very nice. Some of my best friends have trees.

The problem is that tree planting is linked to an unsavory and unfortunate legacy in the Great Plains that still colors perceptions today. We need to separate the reasonable practice of planting a tree for shade, shelter, or fruit from the concept that white Europeans have a God-given right and duty to convert barren prairie wastelands into neat rows of corn and trees. I’m sure most people aren’t consciously making that connection as they dig a hole for their new apple tree seedling, but that doesn’t mean the cultural influence isn’t lurking in the background.

He makes a good argument: healthy prairie ecosystems are wonderfully complex, and yes, they do store CO2, if that is on your mind. We could let prairie be prairie without "improving" it  — although even Helzer admits that shelterbelts are OK around farmsteads.

Chemical "Stewardship" and Vanishing Shelterbelts

Hunter walking a North Dakota tree row.

Beginning in the 1930s, government programs helped prairie farmers to plant shelterbelts (a/k/a tree rows or windbreaks) in order to reduce wind erosion and to protect isolated farmsteads across the Great Plains.

In the program's best years, the 1950s–1960s, hundreds of thousands of trees were planted. North Dakota alone had 55,000 miles of shelterbelts planted since the 1930s. They are not all there now.

“Those windbreaks still play a huge role out there. They do a lot to encourage protection from erosion, up to 10 times the distance of their height. They increase row crop productivity by 10 to 25 percent, and livestock sheltered there see improved weight gains of 10 percent,” [Larry Kotchman, head of the North Dakota Forest Service] said. “A farmstead will see energy savings of 20 to 30 percent in less heating and cooling.”

Shelterbelts changed the environment for wildlife, providing more habitat for songbirds and encouraging whitetail deer to move into more areas. Thanks to the increased deer population, eastern North Dakota—where I am writing this—now even has a few mountain lions.

Trees can also provide an important refuge for wildlife. Two years ago, [when]  the snow was very deep, wildlife suffered when their grass and food plots were buried, [Diane Erickson, district conservationist in Clark County, S.D.] explained.

“Deer and pheasant loss was high,” Erickson said. “Shelterbelts or thick tree plantings are their main source of shelter and even a good food source. Wildlife needs habitat, and tree belts are the best winter habitats.”

Today, government agencies still encourage and fund shelterbelt planting, but more and more are being bulldozed in the name of "stewardship," which means profit. An agricultural-business site reports,

Fields often are divided into quarter sections (160 acres) and "80s" (80 acres.)

Decades ago, one or more shelterbelts often were planted on a quarter or 80.

That divided a single field into several -- for example, an 80 might have become two 40-acre fields -- and protected topsoil in all the fields from wind erosion.

Now, many farmers are removing shelterbelts to combine fields into a single, bigger one.

Shelterbelts did what they were supposed to, but times have changed, [Terry Weckerly, president of the North Dakota Grain Growers Association] says.

Most farmers today use production methods that leave more organic matter on the field and disturb the soil less, greatly decreasing the need for windbreaks, he says.

Shelterbelts often become "a nuisance, an obstacle," he says. For example, branches breaking off trees and falling into fields complicates farming, he says.

More significantly, shelterbelts make it more difficult to apply chemicals properly, he says. (Emphasis added)

So let's review this. Shelterbelts, once established, provided all their agricultural benefits for free while benefiting multiple species.

But "Being a good steward of the land is more than just putting trees in the ground."

Evidently, "being a good steward" means cutting the trees to gain a few more acres, then spraying all kinds of herbicides and insecticides on the ground, which run off with the snowmelt and also filter into the groundwater. That is what "no-till" farming requires: lots of honeybee-killing Roundup and the like.

(See the picture-perfect farmstead with the neatly painted house, the huge metal equipment sheds, the rows of stately trees—they don't cut the ones by the house—and the perfectly mowed lawns? Who knows what is in its well water?)

Plus convenience: "Another reason farmers have wanted to take out windbreaks is to make it easier to turn equipment. In the wet years two and three years ago, when sloughs took over parts of fields, tree rows made it harder to navigate tractors and combines—especially since equipment is all larger than it was years ago."

Nevertheless, the financial incentives to plant new shelterbelts and replace dying trees are still there, through various agencies. Those staffers keep making the same recommendations that they made in the 1950s—and they are still good ones.

And the same farmer who defends today's methods—who says that he needs them to pay off his loans—will sit across from you at lunch and agree that there aren't as many sharptail grouse as there were even ten years ago, that there aren't as many big whitetail bucks as there used to be, that there aren't as many birds in general.

No contradictions, nope.

Back When the VW Bug Was an Off-road Vehicle

In 1956, if you owned a Type I Volkswagen Bug in South Dakota, you had yourself an off-road vehicle.

Here is Dad's VW with evidence of a successful antelope hunt on the roof rack and his friend Harry Linde (owner of a sawmill near Keystone, S. D.) posing with their rifles.

There were also stories about chasing jackrabbits in that car . . .

But don't go chasing across the prairie/steppe in an old VW Bug today: get a replica Kübelwagen T-82.

Back Across the Wide Missouri: This Explorer's Record Was Real

Leaving Pierre for Fort Pierre. You know it is pronounced "Peer," right?

When I re-crossed the wide Missouri at Pierre, South Dakota, homeward bound, I stopped to see a historical spot that I had never visited.

Looking across the Missouri R. at Pierre, South Dakota, from the Verendrye Site.

The Verendrye Site is in Fort Pierre, Pierre's smaller sibling on the west side of the river. The leaders of a French expedition in 1742-43 left a lead plaque here memorializing their visit as they gazed over the junction of the Bad and Missouri rivers.

There is a small public park at the site today.

The French explorers placed their lead plate in a cairn, which fell down or was destroyed, but local children found it again in 1913.

Unlike the Thoen Stone, which is sort of the Kensington Runestone of South Dakota, the veracity of the  Verendrye plate has never been questioned.

Found in 1887, the Thoen stone was supposedly cut by the last survivor of a group of gold prospectors who had entered the Black Hills illegally in 1834..  If you know the history of the Kensington Runestone, you can see a certain parallel: "I (we) am (are) the last survivor(s)"

Looking downriver across Fort Pierre from the Verendrye Site.

Across the Wide Missouri

The bridge across the Missouri River on US 212 near Charger's Camp.

Friday found me driving through western South Dakota's buttes county. There was the famous Bear Butte — state park and ceremonial site —hazy to the south, like one of the Black Hills that had wandered out from the herd. 

Mud Butte (also the site of a famous T-Rex skeleton, but not as complete as Sue's, was close to the highway. There must be stories about it that go way, way back.

"Hey, remember the time when there was that little herd of mammoths on the north side of the butte? Crazy Kid, Many Arrows, and White Dog were going to circle around on the west side, but they bumped into some of those really big wolves that had the same idea. They about shit themselves."

"Oh yeah, those big big wolves. Haven't seen any since I was a kid."

"Me neither. Not so many mammoths either."

"That's all right. I like the taste of bison better anyway."

The story of Charger's Camp. Click to enlarge and read.

The Missouri is wide here, but what you are seeing is Lake Oahe, backed up by a dam down by Pierre, the state capital. One of those big Corps of Engineers projects from the 1960s. Still, the river was big enough for 19th-century steamboats, at least during a window of high water from late spring into late summer.

If we followed the geographer's rule that a river is named from its longest piece, not for a tributary, then the Missouri (2,341 miles/3,767 km) is the main river, while the Mississippi (2,320 miles/3,734) is, by a riverine whisker, the tributary.

Huckleberry Finn and Jim would have rafted the Missouri River. The bluffs at Vicksburg and Natchez would look down on the Missouri. Some people like that Missouri Delta blues sound, while levees keep the Missouri from flooding New Orleans.

Most of all, instead of the Mississippi dividing the 48 states into East and West, the Missouri would divide the continental US on a sort of northwest-southeast line, and I wonder how differently that would make us think about ourselves — how it would line up with cultural patterns.

For instance, "East Dakota" and "West Dakota." West Dakota would have been scenic but economically struggling until the Bakken oil came in.

That Steampunk T-Rex named Sue

It was big news in paleontology circles in the 1990s when private fossil hunters in western South Dakota unearthed an outstanding Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton that was given the name of Sue, after  discoverer Sue Hendrikson.

A lengthy custody battle ensued (hah), with an FBI raid and a state-private-tribal-federal kerfuffle, since the site where Sue was found was managed by the Department of the Interior in trust for the Sioux nation. Ultimately, the private fossil hunters lost, and the skeleton was auctioned by Sotheby's and bought by the Field Museum in Chicago for $7.6 million.

"Sue" by John Lopez.

So Sue is in Chicago and now quite famous, but in Faith, South Dakota, the little town nearest the site, she is also created in a very fine and sort of steampunk-ish sculpture by South Dakota sculptor John Lopez (here is his studio website with other examples).

Built to last. Note the heavy drive chain.

What U.S. CIty Has the Least Predictable Weather?

How many places have I visited where someone said, "If you don't like the weather here, just wait a while"?

Where is that statement truest? Rapid City, South Dakota.

So say Nate Silver, statistician and predictor of sporting events and elections, and his associate Reuben Fischer-Baum.

Among large metropolitan areas, it's Kansas City.

Bible Verses for Pheasant Hunters

You drive through the prairie states at this time of year, and there are lots of "Welcome Hunters" signs on motels and stores. Pheasant season is at its peak, especially south of Interstate 94, which seem to follow some kind of climate boundary—there are fewer pheasants north of it.

Where I am staying right now in Valentine, Nebraska, I can see people walking bird dogs under the motel's red neon lights. On the highway, pickup trucks with dog boxes, some pulling duck boats, flash past.

But it was a Days Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, that took the prize. Its sign read, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat. Acts 10:9."

The Tumbleweed Menace

Colorado Springs Gazette columnist Bill Radford notices the tumbleweed hordes of 2013. 

Oh yeah. I am not one of those people who goes around mowing everything mowable — that is so Midwestern— but this year I mowed one little meadow that I had not touched in twenty years, because it was sprouting kochia and Russian thistle, the baddies:

In El Paso County, the two chief culprits are Russian thistle and kochia, [rancher Sharon] Pattee says. The Colorado State University Extension labels them both as "troublesome annual weeds of rangeland, pastures, fields, disturbed areas, gardens, roadsides, ditch banks and small acreages."

Both are non-native species. Russian thistle originated in, yep, Russia, and is believed to have come to the United States in the late 1800s through contaminated flax seed. Kochia is from Asia.

Tumbleweed Christmas trees? Been there, done that. One year when I was little, I was sick in bed during Christmas, so my older sisters decorated a big globe tumbleweed with glass ornaments and put it by my bed.

This was when we lived in Rapid City, S.D., where they were easy to come by.  This year in southern Colorado, every barbed wire fence looks like a fuzzy brown wall. Yeech.

South Dakota As You Have Never Seen It

Dakotalapse is a site featuring time-lapse photography videos created by Randy Halverson of Kennebec, S.D. (That is the White River in one series.)

I shot Horizons from April - October 2012 mostly in South Dakota, but also some at Devils Tower in Wyoming. From the rugged Badlands, the White River valley and the Black Hills, the horizons seem to endlessly change.

You can download the videos for a small fee. They are gorgeous.

Passing of Mary Crow Dog

The New York Times reports the death of Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, better known under her other name of Mary Crow Dog, which she used for her books Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman.

An early member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), she remained a defender of its influence:

“Before AIM came, people didn’t have their long hair, people didn’t have their Indian pride,” she said. “Everybody was assimilated. These people still put AIM people down, but now they are having sun dances. Before, nobody did it because everybody was Catholic and nobody knew about the Indian ways until the AIM people came. Now they are a lot better off, but they still don’t recognize the movement.”

Walking the Keystone Pipeline Route

This guy sets out to walk the length of the Keystone pipeline, starting in Alberta and going south, and makes a blog of it, Pipe Dreams.

It starts here, in September 2012.

Blog Stew: You Can't Buy It at the Mall

• Dead malls of Denver: A slideshow.

• A second wild colony of black-footed ferrets has been found — in South Dakota. 

• in the southern Rockies, we think of ghost towns as being mining towns. In the Pacific Northwest, there is another type.

Still Carving Crazy Horse

As a Forest Service district ranger in the Black Hills, Dad was present for the creation of Korczak Ziolkowski's huge Crazy Horse monument. I remember seeing it as a little boy, when it was just a ridge with a notch in it created by dynamite and earth-moving. I was familiar with Mount Rushmore, and I could not see how this ridge and notch would ever be anything like that.

From Crazy Horse Memorial website.

Dad always dismissed Ziokowski himself as a nut.

Fast forward twenty years: I go back as an adult and yes, I can see where the warrior's head, his outstretched arm, and the horse's head are supposed to be.

When I visited two years ago, there was a face.

The New York Times visits the Ziokowski family's ongoing project, now in its sixty-fifth year, to build the world's largest sculpture. It's a little like one family deciding to build a Gothic cathedral. Progress is slow.

The Indians' own response has been mixed over the years.

“I’ve never heard a single Native American, not one, ever say I’m proud of that mountain,” said Tim Giago, the founder of Native Sun News, based in nearby Rapid City. 

Thomas Shortbull, president of Oglala Lakota College, which receives a number of scholarships from the foundation, acknowledged the discontent. “But most people see the positive of filling the void of the lack of recognition that we have in this country for Indian people,” he added. 

Giago is a longtime journalist, and I expect that he knows whereof he speaks.  On the other hand, the Ziokowskis say they got a sort of tribal go-ahead back in the 1930s:

Although the idea originated with Indian leaders — “this is to be entirely an Indian project under my direction,” Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota chief, wrote in a 1939 letter to the sculptor — Mr. Ziolkowski discovered after his arrival that the local tribes had little to give, either in money or labor, Ms. Ziolkowski said.

Dad last visited the Black Hills in 1999, a few years before his death. We did not visit Crazy Horse—his agenda of people and places to see was more personal to him. I go by it now when I am in the Hills and realize that as a boy I underestimated the Ziolkowskis' tenacity. Maybe one day the Crazy Horse Memorial will be seen as an important American site.

The motto of "Never Forget Your Dreams" has wide appeal, and meanwhile, Crazy Horse has a webcam.

Revisiting the "Buffalo Commons"

Back in the 1980s, two New Jersey professors raised a ruckus on the High Plains by arguing that, given falling populations and the gradual depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, the plains should be given over to some combination of parks and a different, non-irrigated agriculture including buffalo ranching, activities that would support a smaller but sustainable population—a concept known as the Buffalo Commons.

Few people wanted to hear that. Not only was it coming from New Jersey professors who by definition could not know anything about anything, but it was a slap in the face to the whole survivor mythos of the High Plains—that the people there had survived grasshopper plagues, droughts, blizzards, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, ups and downs in commodity prices, isolation, and indeed, a gradual decline from the "good years," the first two decades of the 20th century. In general, they reacted angrily to the proposal that they "surrender."

But population was falling:

Their continuing research showed that hundreds of counties in the American West still have less than a sparse 6 persons per square mile — the density standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American Frontier closed in 1893. Many have less than 2 persons per square mile.

The frontier never came close to disappearing, and in fact has expanded in the Plains in recent years. The 1980 Census showed 388 frontier counties west of the Mississippi. The 1990 Census shows 397 counties in frontier status, and the 2000 Census showed 402. Most of this frontier expansion is in the Great Plains. Kansas actually has more land in frontier status than it did in 1890.

My personal connection: in the early 1920s, the era of prosperity, my maternal grandparents as a young couple ran a store in the High Plains town of Arriba, Colorado (pr. "AIR-a-buh"). When I saw Arriba in the 1970s, it had no business district at all except a Flying J truck stop and an antiques store. Now there is a wind farm too. My grandparents got out before the collapse, but it caught up to them elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the professors, Frank and Deborah Popper, geographer and urban planner (yes, ironic) have not given up on the Buffalo Commons idea.

At a recent conference in Salina, Kansas, Frank Popper said, "We never really expected it to have the impact it did and does. We would have recoiled then that we would still be talking about it 23 years later. It's clear that in the intervening years a quiet muscle of reality, a lot of the trends we saw in the depopulation of the Plains has continued."

"I've been accused of having a slightly un-American approach to the land and the environment, where growth is not always the be-all and end-all, where growth can go too far, and the Buffalo Commons implies a quietism or defeatism," Frank Popper said. "Instead, the Buffalo Commons implies too much growth can be a mistake, overburdening the land, overmastering the environment and in the end always getting kicked in the rear or the pocketbook--or someplace else.

"I realize there is a social comedy in two people from back east who are telling people in the Plains what to do with their land. I've enjoyed it, but there are important things to look at in how we treat this vast, characteristically American chunk of land. There are lessons here on how to live on the land that can be applied to the Corn Belt, the lower Mississippi delta, and parts of our largest cities--like Detroit--that are depopulating like the Plains. It's about sustainability. It's about being American."

 Some politicians are quietly coming around, he notes, and a Great Plains National Park "may actually happen."

Blog Stew at These Prices

• Snarky people like to call Boulder, Colorado, "twenty-five square miles surrounded by reality." So what do you call Aspen? "Disneyland for adults" has been suggested.

• In my corner of Colorado, my rural DNS service got a grade of D, "slower than 72% of US." (Why we do not watch streaming movies—not at download speeds of 1.29 megabytes/second. Hurray for Qwest "Heavy Duty Internet/Broadband Service.")

• You can compare your broadband-connection speed to the rest of the country too.

• On the other hand, our friend the Sun could easily make the whole question irrelevant, destroying online connectivity overnight.

• Corson County, South Dakota, sheriff has more buffalo than people in his county.

• And what's this "singing sheriff" stuff? Custer County's Fred Jobe is "the singing sheriff." Do we need a Singing Sheriff Showdown?

Firefighters Protect Endangered Dinosaurs

Photo: Rapid City Journal

A grass fire on a ridge in Rapid City, South Dakota, swirled smoke around these icons of my childhood—lifesize concrete dinosaurs built as a WPA project in the 1930s.

Pushed  by a brisk breeze, the fire burned about five acres on Dinosaur Hill.

I know just where the trucks were parked, because in September 2009, I stayed in a nearby motel, walked Fisher on Skyline Drive, and revisited the dinosaurs up close for the first time in many years.

Watch some raw video of the Rapid City FD in action.

Via Wildfire Today.

Die Volkswagen ist die Jägerwagen

When Dad got a Volkswagen Type I in 1956, he treated it like an off-road vehicle. Maybe he had seen the Kübelwagen when he was in Germany at the close of World War II. (You can sitll buy a replica Kübelwagen in New Mexico.)

Here it is on a South Dakota antelope hunt with his friend Harry Linde, a Black Hills sawmill operator and frequent hunting partner, sitting on the front bumper.