Just about the sharpest disagreement my parents and I ever had
revolved around bucking calves and silver dollars. It happened
the year I turned 8, when my family drove west from Minnesota
for vacation. We dropped by a little jackpot rodeo at the foot
of the Black Hills, near the South Dakota-Wyoming state line,
and the rodeo announcer invited kids to try their luck riding
lively calves at intermission. Contestants who hung on for eight
seconds would pocket a silver dollar, and those who failed, the
announcer predicted, would still win appreciative applause.
I declared I was going to ride a calf and claim a shiny dollar,
certain to come in handy on vacation. My folks said I wasn't,
and I knew by their tones the decision would stick. But I argued
my case anyway, got nowhere, and sulked through the bareback and
bulldogging events. I brooded not just because of lost cash and
glory, but because I sensed I wasn't a passer-by who belonged
in the bleachers.
Vacation ended, but I couldn't clear my head of the piney breeze,
high ridges outlined against the sky, bawling cattle, and guys
who wore Stetsons and pointy leather boots. That spot called to
me in a way that remains vivid in memory. Plus, I just liked the
idea of a place that put its kids aboard bucking livestock. I
recalled how youngsters tossed into the red dust that day did,
indeed, hear warm applause. A boy my age, lucky enough to ride
but not for long, returned to the bleachers rubbing his shoulder.
Toughen up, his mom advised.
Forty-four years later I live a mile from where that little
arena sat, in Spearfish, South Dakota. My dad accepted a teaching
position at Black Hills State College in Spearfish five years
after the memorable rodeo, so I graduated from high school in
Spearfish, met the most significant mentors of my life there,
and also met my wife, Janet. She grew up on a ranch north of town.
We raised two daughters in Spearfish, and the town nurtured us
all.
Not that the Black Hills and surrounding prairies always strike
those casually acquainted with the region as nurturing. You have
to understand the historical dependence on hardrock mining, lumber
milling and ranching to grasp the toughen-up mantra. Tough isn't
something to strut; it's simply a quality that moves you toward
your next paycheck. In that environment, tender words don't count
for much. Deeds do. Last year my father-in-law, the cattle rancher,
underwent heart bypass surgery. My mother-in-law waited at the
hospital until she knew he was through the operation safely then
left before he fully regained consciousness. She headed back to
the ranch to supervise moving cattle from one pasture to another,
a massive, hot job involving a couple hundred bovines perfectly
content to stay put. My mother-in-law found babying her husband
in a hospital a pointless notion. Instead she returned the next
morning to report a big deed done.
For my own father, life as a college professor didn't mean a
comfortable campus existence. Black Hills State, the only liberal
arts college for hundreds of sparsely populated miles, put its
professors on the road to teach extension courses in small towns
and Indian reservations across western South Dakota. I remember
my dad arriving home at midnight or later, having driven two or
three hours after teaching a far-flung class, covering country
where not a single man-made light could be seen in any direction.
He preferred those lonely trips to on-campus, faculty committee
work. Still, the drives could be hard, especially in winter.
Not as hard as Harvey Fellows' drives, though. As far as I've
been able to determine, Spearfish was the last town in the nation
to claim regularly scheduled stagecoach service. For decades Fellows,
until the last run in 1913, delivered passengers and parcels to
and from Deadwood, 15 rugged miles up a trail so steep that the
stage's brake shoes were shot after a single week's wear. I missed
knowing Fellows by several years, but I met Clyde Ice, Spearfish's
aviation pioneer who advised Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford
and became something of a legend himself for humanitarian flights.
Ice, who, against all odds, lived to 103, routinely took off from
Spearfish into blizzards and other onerous conditions to transport
desperately ill or injured people stranded at distant ranches
or prairie towns.
Outsiders sometimes think rural folk revel in isolation. In fact,
local heroes are often those who take risks and demonstrate endurance
in reducing isolation, delivering everything from the mail to
college coursework.
In my youth, Fellows and Ice were held as Spearfish giants.
Neighboring Deadwood boasted Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane,
characters we in Spearfish considered a bit over the top. The
individual who to my mind will always epitomize Spearfish, though,
and who always impressed me by recognizing me on sight, was Russell
Jonas. As the Black Hills State president, he hired my dad, and
I doubt there ever lived a university president who knew the true
nature of the West better. Jonas grew up on a South Dakota homestead,
he wrote, in the days of fording dangerous streams, fighting driving
snow, and watching drought and grasshoppers destroy the land.
Combine the hard lessons and ethics of that land with higher education,
Jonas believed, and his school would turn out remarkable men and
women. He deserves credit for his groundbreaking success in helping
American Indian students get into college classrooms, in Spearfish
and at those scattered extension sites.
What I personally remember best about Jonas is how I'd spot
him outside, wearing his trademark cowboy hat and work clothes,
dragging a hose across a campus lawn or carrying boxes of supplies.
His style communicated that no one in the West should think themselves
above useful, manual labor. To this day, no college or university
president I've met seems complete without a Stetson.
While many Americans relate South Dakota to the Midwest, in
Spearfish that region feels far removed and is usually referred
to as East River, meaning the other side of the distant Missouri
River. Spearfish folks may envy East River South Dakota for its
beautiful game pheasants and relatively plentiful rainfall, but
most wouldn't trade the spectacularly rugged Black Hills for any
quantity of birds or moisture. Spearfish lies in a wide valley
at the mouth of a deep Black Hills canyon, a place of pines and
high cliffs and waterfalls that feels like the town's back yard.
From that canyon flows cool air so fragrant it's almost intoxicating
some summer nights and a swift, clear mountain stream.
When my family first visited in 1961, about 3,500 Spearfish
residents lived within a few blocks of that creek. On summer's
hottest days it seemed every kid magically produced an inner tube
for an icy, spinning ride down the creek, from one end of town
to the other. When the creek emptied of tubers, fly fishermen
waded in and pulled trout from the waters. Just two of Spearfish's
streets were paved then, but community leaders were hammering
out a plan to remedy that. They also went to work to get Interstate
90 routed directly past town. A little fine-tuning, their thinking
appeared to be, and the world would come to Spearfish. There is
a little arrogance in the rural West, a belief that anyone exciting
will eventually come your way, and those who don't are unimaginative
types who climb corporate ladders, not rocky outcrops.
Spearfish offers precious few corporate ladders. Visitors who
ask, "How do you possibly make a living here?" never will. Plenty
of my neighbors, though, make quite a comfortable living by carving
out unusual niches, rustling up projects, tying projects together
and, not infrequently, hitting the lonely road to reach clients.
If it gets overwhelming they tell themselves to toughen up.
They also keep their imaginations engaged. Here's something
I have trouble communicating to urban friends who think that cities
alone drive the national beat: When my family lived in the Minneapolis-Saint
Paul metro area before moving to Spearfish, my fifth-grade teacher
wasted no opportunity to remind students how central the Twin
Cities were to national consciousness in 1965. She used illustrations
that 11-year-olds appreciated: Hubert Humphrey a heartbeat from
the White House, the Twins baseball team World-Series bound, the
Beatles coming to our town. Yet a couple years later as a Spearfish
teenager I felt closer yet to the nation's psyche, part of the
vast West -- the West of the imagination. The Beatles played the
Twin Cities. But they sang, in one ballad, of the Black Hills.
It's regular, personal interaction with imaginative people that
keeps me in Spearfish. Kent writes novels, Dick paints. Elaine
and Jerry coordinate marathons across the nation. Johanna, retired
from the Metropolitan Opera, coaches singers. Dan coaches Olympians.
Kay and Jim produce and market radio dramas, Bob invents dental
equipment, Mike runs a sanctuary for exotic animals, while Gary
polishes music and jokes for frequent gigs on the Late Show
with David Letterman and the Grand Ole Opry. These are just
the folks with whom I'm on a first-name basis, ones I can meet
to swap tales over coffee at the little Two Pines shop on Main.
It's there I sometimes also run into friends from high school
who moved away for careers. Some hope to return someday, although
maybe not until retirement, and they wonder whether they'll recognize
Spearfish then. The town's tripled in population since our school
days and continues to grow. The old section looks and feels much
as it did, especially along the creek, and residents worked successfully
to preserve beautiful native sandstone commercial buildings and
our century-old opera house.
But, visiting old-timers always ask, why couldn't Spearfish
put some of its highly touted imagination to work and find a way
to grow and prosper without ringing itself with big-box stores
and fast-food logo signs, all spelling national uniformity? Community
leaders of the 1960s were right. The world came to Spearfish but
in unexpected guise.
Today, sadly, it's possible to live here and put Spearfish's
natural setting out of mind. Years back, on weekends when the
canyon's waterfalls hit full flow or its autumn colors peaked,
that's where most Spearfish folk headed. Many still do, but packed
parking lots attest that big chain stores do fine in head-to-head
competition against waterfalls and foliage. So I'm grateful for
people like Kevin, who phoned me awhile back and asked me to meet
him the next morning without applying deodorant or aftershave.
We were going elk bugling, and elk can smell those substances
across vast distances. I'd put off Kevin's elk adventure for some
time; too busy, I told myself. Thankfully, he persisted.
The next morning he and I drove to a gulch a couple miles west
of Spearfish, hiked along a creek a few minutes, examined a wallow
where mud was gashed with huge hoof prints, and then climbed a
ridge to a wide aspen and ponderosa-pine forest. Kevin motioned
me behind a pine and pierced the air with a high, clear note on
his elk call, an instrument with a latex reed, complete with a
two-foot corrugated plastic grunt tube.
No answer.
Kevin waited a minute, called again, and immediately was answered
by the rich, truly musical bugle of a bull elk. Within a couple
minutes we heard branches and undergrowth snapping as the bull
made its way toward us. He moved within 20 yards and dug at the
ground with great antlers, six points on each side. A bull elk
at that range, in the wild, is magnificently intimidating; this
one, probably 900 pounds, searched for what it believed was another
bull bugling a challenge. Finally he decided no other elk were
present and lumbered away. Kevin attempted to lure him back, using
the grunt tube to manufacture cow talk. It sounded good to me
but didn't impress the elk.
It's moments like that when I feel most connected to Spearfish.
Two miles from my home I came face to face with a wild bull elk,
and another time a snorting mountain goat chased me down the canyon,
but I still regret never riding a bucking calf.
Paul Higbee is a magazine and documentary TV writer.
(January 2006)
