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 [...]
Want to hear South Dakota Magazine Editor Bernie Hunhoff hemming and hawing 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
When it rains it pours. Much of East River got a windy drenching again overnight. A lot of the cropland — at least here in the south — has been planted, but farmers are steering around potholes they forgot they had on their land. This stock dam on a farm northwest of little Lesterville is [...]
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 [...]
Garth Brooks came to South Dakota
for Kelsy Hoffman’s graduation.
Doug Lund’s blog on the KELO site has a charming account of Garth Brooks’ appearance at the Hartford graduation party last weekend. His surprise showing made the state news, but Doug was there and — as he always did on television — he brings [...]
We figured we’d kick the week off with a contest. The first person to very specifically guess what this picture is wins a free and autographed copy of our fairly new book, “South Dakota’s Best Stories.” You have to take an autographed copy — not an unsigned book. The street value is somewhere between $19.95 [...]
Nobody wants to write about the Ted Klaudt case of child molestation, but it has sucked the fresh spring air out of South Dakota like few other events. Like the elephant in the room, Ted Klaudt can’t be ignored. Of course, the biggest tragedy is the harm done to the young girls. We trust that [...]
Coldfoot, Alaska – Gateway to the Gates of the Arctic National Park
Happy customers at the Ice House.
I think of Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the dock by the bay” everytime I drive by the historic Ice House in Yankton — and I drive by often, because Roger Clemens could throw a beer bottle from our office to the Ice House a few blocks away. The drive-up bar [...]
What farmer hasn’t dreamed of making money on something easy to grow – like thistles or cedar trees?
For more than a decade, ag leaders and politicians have been talking about the potential for carbon sequestration. The concept is that polluters could salve their environmental excesses by purchasing carbon credits from landowners who manage their property [...]