Author Archives: Colton Hall

The South Dakota Army National Guard’s 155^th Engineer Company has received an alert order for possible mobilization to Kuwait.

The 155^th and its 162 assigned members are scheduled for deployment in the August 2015 timeframe. The unit’s headquarters is in Rapid  City with its Detachment 1 in Wagner. The unit includes five to six persons from the Winner area. Of the company’s 162 members, 90 are from Wagner and the surrounding area.

The 155^th is a vertical engineer company capable of providing engineer support in the construction of base camps as well as constructing, repairing and maintaining other vertical infrastructures in support of units within a brigade combat team, division or corps.

The unit will report to Fort Bliss, Texas, to complete several weeks of theater-specific training prior to deployment overseas.

This will be the second mobilization for the 155^th which deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Noble Eagle in 2002-2003.

Nine years ago Marla Bull Bear did a vision quest, something traditionally done by young men to seek life guidance. She hiked a summit above the pine timber reserves on the Rosebud Reservation, her home, and waited quietly for answers.

The reason behind the vision quest was a feeling that she, and other community leaders needed to do something about a rash of suicides that occurred on the Rosebud about 10 years ago. They met with at the St. Francis school in 2002 to brainstorm solutions. Roy Stone, a medicine man from Mission, opened the program with a prayer and spoke of the Lakota circle of life. Other leaders offered their perspectives. Later, someone surveyed the youth to see if any of the ideas had an impact. Most teens mentioned one particular speaker: the medicine man.

“I thought about that for a while and then I realized that he was different because he spoke about their culture and they must have wanted that connection,” says Marla Bull Bear, a camp founder. She and several friends brainstormed and came up with the idea of a summer of camps designed to connect the teens with their Lakota roots.

After the first summer Bull Bear was happy with the success of the camps but had a feeling she must do more. She and six female friends then did the vision quest, 24 hours on the summit. Meditating about what path her life should take. “That helped me clarify what I need to do,” she said. That was 9 years and 6,000 campers ago.

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe provided ten acres on the site of Milk’s Camp, a near forgotten village founded by the renowned Chief Milk. Most original residences are now gone, but there is a pow wow grounds remaining along Ponca Creek and an Episcopal Church. Chief Milk is buried on a hill above the old church.

The youth retreats are known as Family Camp. At least four camps are held every summer, each four days long with a different theme. Harvest camp in early June is based around the Indian culture’s edible and medicinal herbs. Three hundred have been identified on the camp’s grounds including wild turnips, purple coneflower (the root eases toothaches) sweet grass used for smudging and wide-leaf wild sage that was brought from Bear Butte.

The other themes are  hunting, leadership camp and horsemanship. Bullbear and her assistants don’t have the time or resources to track the success rate of the youth who have attended camps. In fact, they hardly have the resources to run the camps. “We run on a shoestring,” she told a South Dakota Magazine writer. “The tribe has helped. The state has helped. If we had $100,000 a year we would be flourishing. We are probably operating on half of that.”

To raise more money, Bull Bear and her helpers at the Native American Advocacy Program are inviting tourists to Milk’s Camp for retreats, reunions or group gatherings. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn the about Lakota culture while sleeping in canvas tipis and lodge houses. Bull Bear helps that welcoming visitors will raise enough revenue to continue the Family Camps in summer.

During the dead of winter it’s fun to think of riding horses on green grass, searching for while turnips, singing around the campfire and taking nature walks. We all feel that way, but none more so than the kids from Rosebud and Pine Ridge who attended Family Camp. If you are making summer vacation plans in February, check out the website at www.lakotanaap.org to see what they have to offer for non-campers. You might learn something new.

The tall prairie grass would have rolled like waves sweeping across a windy bay.

Stan Johnson imagined how the wind would have swept the prairie grass 100 years earlier as he traveled near Milbank on a passenger train.

In 1941, Johnson’s parents allowed him to travel alone from Chicago, Ill., to Tacoma, Wash., on the Olympian, one of America’s greatest luxury trains of pre-World War II days. Johnson’s stepfather was a conductor on the Olympian and, although he was only 13, Johnson had already made many trips by train from the West Coast to Chicago. Johnson described the journey in “The Milwaukee Road Olympian: A Ride to Remember,” published by the Museum of North Idaho.

The Olympian was operated by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (the Milwaukee Road) between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. It featured elegant air-conditioned cars, comfortable berths and gourmet dining. The Olympian entered South Dakota near Big Stone City about 5 hours after pulling out of the St. Paul Union Station at 8:40 a.m. Central Time, according to one of the book’s reproduced timetables.

The many Irish and Dutch families who settled near Milbank raised grain and built windmills that ground grain into flour. By the time Johnson traveled through Milbank, the sole windmill stood in the center of town as a historical monument.

The Olympian traveled past Webster, Bristol, Andover, Groton and Bath, all known as ’10-mile towns’ because of the spacing between sidings, Johnson wrote.

Johnson realized the area through which the train was passing had once been prime buffalo hunting country. Now Johnson saw migratory birds, and hoped in vain to see coyotes and pheasants.

The Olympian pulled into Aberdeen’s brick depot on time at 3:50 p.m. and stopped for 10 minutes as train and engine crews were changed.

“The place was planned as a railroad town and had fulfilled expectations,” Johnson wrote. “There was a train in or out of the city every 18 minutes in 1920. West of town were Milwaukee-run stockyards for cattle, sheep and hogs, and in town there was a large freight yard and engine terminal facilities, including a roundhouse.”

Four railroads went through Aberdeen in 1941, and branch lines radiated from the city.

At Ipswich, a town that had once led the nation in the shipping of bison bones that were used for fertilizer, the grade began to climb. A small geological marker near Selby noted the edge of the Great American Desert and the beginning of the true West. Johnson’s plans for this trip’s introduction to the West began in Mobridge.

During summers in the 1930s and 1940s, Lakota dancers met the Olympian when it made a 12-minute stop at Mobridge. It became an event eagerly anticipated by train passengers.

“The Indians dressed in the most gorgeous of ceremonial outfits: full eagle-feathered headdresses, buckskin fringed leggings and skirts with beadwork, small bells and porcupine quills sewn in intricate designs, and exquisite handmade moccasins with still more beadwork on their feet,” Johnson wrote.

The group would dance several short dances to the beat of a small drum that one of the children would play.

“It was exciting to be there close to them and to witness something unquestionably genuine and real. It was like someone operating a window back into history,” Johnson stated.

After leaving the depot at Mobridge, Johnson looked down into the yellow-brown water of the Missouri River as Olympian crossed the Missouri River bridge. The first train steamed across the bridge in March 1908.

“The trusses of the bridge, angled for strength, slipped past the window on an oblique pathway that caused them to appear to be moving first up and then down, almost as though they were involved in some sort of rhythmic dance. The bridge was long, nearly as long as 10 football fields laid end to end, so there was plenty of time to enjoy the experience,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson realized that the Missouri River divided the state into two different areas: the prairie grassland of the west side and the crop farming of the east side. He also noted that South Dakota landscape could be characterized as being one of two types. “Either it is gently rolling grassy plains with low rounded hills, or a harsher, sterner countryside of hills and gullies eroded by the sun and wind and water, watched over by higher and sharper hills.”

The Olympian reached Lemmon at 7:30 p.m. Mountain Time.

“The town and countryside looked like a movie Western gunfight set, but historically Lemmon had been known as one of the places where ranchers raising sheep and cattle and those farming got along especially well,” Johnson wrote.

The Olympian soon entered North Dakota, and Johnson continued on his memorable ride to Tacoma. Johnson became, among other things, an elevator operator, a newspaper reporter and an academic psychologist. But mostly, he remained a man who knew and loved railroads.