City of Hustle, page 32
Even with the improvements, the historical stature of Yankton Trail Bridge seems hidden in plain sight. Growing cities prefer to look longingly at the future rather than dwell on the past.
Its utilitarian purpose lessened, the bridge finds itself in a recreation-based role, surrounded by weekend cyclists and wedding photos, with a story that yearns to be told.
Center of Conflict
It was the Big Sioux River and the power and promise of its falls that lured white settlers to town, with competing trading companies laying claims in 1856. Their presence was gravely noted by Native American tribes, who had farmed and formed villages in the area for centuries.
Tensions in the newly christened Dakota Territory were high six years later, when Joseph Amidon was named probate judge, treasurer, and commissioner of Minnehaha County. On August 25, 1862, Amidon and his son, William, were cutting hay on the family homestead north of Sioux Falls when William stumbled upon a Santee Dakota Sioux war party. His body was found riddled with arrows, and Judge Amidon was later shot in the chest, likely with William’s rifle, in the same cornfield where his son met his fate.
Soon after, with the Dakota Conflict that started in Minnesota sparking fears of more violence, an evacuation order was issued for Sioux Falls. Hundreds of settlers packed their belongings and headed for Yankton with a cavalry escort, crossing the Big Sioux River at the point where the historic bridge stands today.
Learning the Land
As the establishment of Fort Dakota spurred a new wave of settlement, a ferry was placed at the Big Sioux crossing in 1880. That was followed by a primitive wooden bridge and eventually the Yankton Trail Bridge in 1895 to accommodate wagon trains and stagecoaches. About two decades later, an agriculturally savvy German immigrant named F. X. Wallner purchased fifty acres of land at Thirty-Third and Minnesota to start his own produce farm, which grew from a roadside stand and nursery to a flourishing wholesale business. The Wallner’s Garden operation later expanded to more than 500 acres, encompassing land that is now Yankton Trail Park and Empire East Mall. During World War II, F. X. Wallner’s sons—Robert and Paul—ran the business and provided produce for soldiers at the airport army base.
Rob Wallner Jr., a 1969 O’Gorman graduate, started working in the family business in seventh grade and recalls hauling truckloads of potatoes across the Yankton Trail Bridge to a warehouse just south of Fifty-Seventh Street, where an office park now resides. “Everything went back and forth across that bridge,” says Wallner. “It was a vital artery for us.”
As one of ten children, he fondly recalls working summers alongside cousins and other teen laborers, with “potato fights” among the favorite activities on the bridge and elsewhere.
“The only way I learned how to throw a baseball was by throwing a potato,” says Wallner. “We threw every vegetable imaginable. The nuclear option was cabbage; you could knock a man clean over. When we’d see my dad coming across the bridge, we knew it was time to get back to work.”
Increased competition and the federal construction of Interstate 229—which cut the Wallners’ land in half—made business more difficult as the city grew southward. The business closed in 1979, leaving behind nearly seven decades of productivity along the Big Sioux.
“In all that time,” says Wallner, “that bridge never failed us.”
Pieces of the Past
It’s early afternoon on a weekday, providing some of the peace that Kameron Carlson craves on his ice cream excursions. At the entryway to the bridge, a runner stops to tie his shoes, holding the beams for support. When renovations occurred in 2010, the structure was sandblasted down to its rusted steel, with plans to paint the exterior. “But it looked nice the way it was,” says Parks and Recreation Director Don Kearney. “We put a clear sealant on it and left it alone.”
That nod to the past adds to the bridge’s anachronistic feel, especially in this part of town. With new restaurants and boutiques crowding spaces across Fifty-Seventh Street and I-229 roaring nearby, is the wood-planked expanse holding things back or propelling us forward? For cyclists crossing the Big Sioux on their bike path journey, and kayakers appearing from below, the slightest recognition of things that came before us is enough to brighten a day. That’s really all Nancy Carlson wanted when she pulled out her camera on a splendid winter morning twelve years ago. In a city surrounded by progress and restless thoughts of the future, appreciating the past seems like a reasonable thing to ask.
The Center for Western Studies
Harry F. Thompson
Herbert Krause Has an Idea
The police car pulled alongside of the man as he was lowering his field glasses. “Sir,” said the officer, “We’ve had a report of someone using binoculars to look in the windows of those buildings over there.” The buildings were Augustana University’s twin tower dormitories, recently constructed on Twenty-Eighth Street. The gentleman with the binoculars was the noted ornithologist and cofounder of the South Dakota Ornithologists’ Union, Herbert Krause, who was known in town for his peripatetic birdwatching. He was often seen on or near the campus or in Woodlawn Cemetery—or in northern Minnesota, his home state, or the Black Hills—tracking the birds he knew so well. But it was Krause’s interest in the historical novel as a professor of English and Writer in Residence at Augustana that led him to the idea of a research center in Sioux Falls.
Writing and Collecting Books
When he came to Augustana in 1938 from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Herbert Krause was first and foremost a poet, but shortly after beginning his teaching duties, he became nationally known, not for his poetry, but for his novel, Wind Without Rain, which won the prestigious “Friends of American Writers Award” in 1939. He based the novel largely on his own experience as a farm boy near Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and so did not need to consult other sources. But for his next two novels, The Thresher (1946) and The Oxcart Trail (1954), he realized that he needed to conduct extensive historical research. He began building his own book collection, which at his death in 1976 numbered over 9,000 volumes. The collection’s focus was the American West, by which Krause meant South Dakota and the six contiguous states, comprising much of original Dakota Territory.
Krause understood the West as a crossroads of Indigenous and European powers, a geographical location at the center of the United States, traversed by Plains Indians, Spanish explorers, French traders, and English, German, and Scandinavian settlers. He believed the student of the Great Plains should know Spanish explorer Cabaza de Vaca’s account of his journey through the Southwest in the 1530s, as well as O. E. Rölvaag’s novels of Norwegian settlement in the Northern Plains in the 1870s.
To learn more about this region, in the 1960s, Krause conceived of a project to survey attitudes about settlement among second- and third-generation Euromericans. With the assistance of a young member of the Augustana history department, William R. “Bill” Wyatt, he obtained funding under the name “The Center for Western Studies” (CWS) from the Rockefeller Foundation, comparing an urban with a rural county on either side of the Missouri River. An inveterate lecturer, Krause also received a Rockefeller Foundation lectureship and so was off to the Philippines, leaving Wyatt to conduct field research. As Eric Bennett observes in Workshops of Empire, the Rockefeller Foundation, established by the Standard Oil Company, was interested at that time in promoting American capitalistic democracy as a bulwark against communism through funding writers and teachers.284 The survey that Wyatt completed in 1967 was followed by another project, this one funded by the nascent National Endowment for the Humanities, to gauge the influence of television viewing habits on residents of three rural counties in western South Dakota. When, after three years, Krause returned from abroad, he recruited another history department faculty member, Gary D. Olson, to manage the growing activities of the center.
Publishing Books
The materials generated by these two projects—oral history recordings and transcripts, letters, and a copy of the minutes of the South Dakota Constitutional Convention of 1885—were the beginnings of the archives of the Center for Western Studies, which was first housed in an office in Augustana’s administration building. With his death in 1976, Krause’s personal library was merged with the Mikkelsen Library’s Dakota Collection, and the center was relocated to Mikkelsen Library. With the doubling of space to the library in 1980, the center was offered additional room for its collections, offices, and exhibits. In 2001, it moved into a new two-story, brick-and-limestone building designed by Sioux Falls architect Jeff Hazard, featuring a distinctive tipi-shaped glass-and-steel rotunda, funded by friends of the center, with the naming gift from Sally Fantle, owner of the Fantle Department Store in downtown Sioux Falls.
The third program area to develop—after library and archives—was book publishing. This was a dimension of the center’s interpretative mission, begun in 1978 with Sundancing on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge, by author Thomas Mails, a friend of Lakota elder and Sundance officiant Fools Crow. A monumental undertaking by an emerging publishing house, Sundancing brought instantaneous recognition and financial difficulty to the center. Unlike today, CWS was at this time struggling to cover the costs of staff salaries and benefits in addition to printing costs for a clothbound, full-color, oversize book of nearly 400 pages. The first 5,000 copies sold well, but the second 5,000 did not, and the book was eventually remaindered. The center did not recover its production costs for several years. From that point forward, throughout its forty-three-year history as the longest continuously operating university-affiliated publisher in the state, the center has covered all production costs in advance.
Over the years, the subject matter of the center’s books has ranged widely. Sundancing was followed immediately by a best-seller, Natural History of the Black Hills, by Sven Froiland, executive director at the time. Other books from the first decade of publishing (1978–1988) include an account of the Allen Issue Station on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a memoir by Frederick Manfred, a collection of short stories by O. E. Rölvaag, a 125th anniversary history of Augustana, a biography of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, an account of the surveying and marking of the North Dakota-South Dakota border, a biography of Cheyenne spiritual leader Wesley Whiteman (Black Bear), and a reprint of a popular history of country railroad stations, another best-seller.
The second decade (1989–1999) began with the publication of An Illustrated History of the Arts in South Dakota, by Arthur R. Huseboe, who was executive director at the time, with a section on Lakota arts by Arthur Amiotte, and funded by both the South Dakota Humanities Council and Arts Council. This was followed by a collection of Krause’s poems and essays, watercolors of Yanktonai Sioux artist John Saul, an account of the marketing of the West by the Northern Pacific Railroad (inaugural volume in the Center’s Prairie Plains Series), a collection of essays by—and a collection of critical essays about—novelist Frederick Manfred, essays on the Germans from Russia, World War II home-front columns in the Argus Leader by Marie Christopherson, a geography of South Dakota, a history of Fort Sisseton, a memoir by President Eisenhower’s speechwriter from Sioux Falls, Arthur Larson, a fiftieth anniversary history of USGS EROS Data Center, an exhibit catalog of Echoes from the Little Big Horn, and new and selected poems by South Dakota Poet Laureate David Allan Evans. Of special note from this period are two publications in partnership with other organizations: a reprint of Martha Coleman Bray’s biography of explorer and cartographer of the Upper Mississippi River Joseph Nicollet, through the auspices of the American Philosophical Society, and poems by Sicangu Lakota writer Lydia Whirlwind Soldier, in conjunction with the Oak Lake Writers’ Society.
South Dakota entered the twentieth century without a new history of the state in forty years. The center sought to rectify this by publishing a history by leading South Dakota historians. In 2005, it brought out A New South Dakota History under the general editorship of the center’s director of research collections and publishing, Harry Thompson. With twenty-seven chapters by sixteen authors, three of whom were Native American, including nationally recognized Lakota author Vine Deloria Jr., the book represented a generation of South Dakota historians, led by Herbert T. Hoover (USD), John E. Miller (SDSU), and David Wolff (BHSU). Winner of an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History, and funded by foundations and private gifts, the book made thousands of dollars for CWS before a single copy was sold. Other books from this third decade (2000–2010) were a collection of Civil War letters by two Wisconsin brothers, a history of Fort Ridgely during the US-Dakota War of 1862, two volumes of newspaper columns by journalist Anson Yeager, longtime editor of the Argus Leader, two books on the Corps of Discovery during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and a history of the South Dakota Farmers Union. The decade ended with a collection of contemporary South Dakota poetry by fourteen writers, including three South Dakota poet laureates, edited by Augustana Writer in Residence Patrick Hicks.
In conjunction with the Eide/Dalrymple Gallery of Augustana University, during the fourth decade of publishing (2011–2021) the center published the exhibition catalog for the Carl Grupp retrospective on display in both the Eide/Dalrymple Gallery and the Madsen/Nelson/Elmen Galleries at CWS. This was followed by a history of the Army Air Forces Technical School in Sioux Falls, an economic history of South Dakota, an account of the cases tried by Dakota frontier judge Peter C. Shannon, a reprint of Krause’s most popular novel, The Thresher, with an introduction by Patrick Hicks, and a collection of essays on Northern Plains conservation (the inaugural volume in the Public Affairs Series). The second volume in this series, a collection of essays on regional identity in the Midwest and Great Plains, The Interior Borderlands, edited by historian Jon Lauck, won the 2020 Midwest Book Award for history. A second history of the state of South Dakota, also by several historians, was published in 2022, edited by Jon Lauck.
Improving Cultural Life
Preserving and interpreting historical and cultural materials is the core of the center’s mission, but so is improving the quality of social and cultural life in the Northern Plains and stimulating interest in the solution to regional problems. The center attempts to do this through its signature public events: the Artists of the Plains Show and Sale, Dakota Conference, and the Boe Forum on Public Affairs. The Artists of the Plains celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2021 and is the longest-running fine art event in South Dakota. Held in downtown Sioux Falls annually, the juried show invites twenty-five artists from the region, including several Native American artists. A hallmark is the presence of the artists themselves, who are available to talk with prospective buyers or with anyone with interest in the life of an artist or the state of art today. The show is free and open to the public, and the center takes no commissions from the artists’ sales.
The Dakota Conference, inherited in 1989 from Dakota State University, provides a unique opportunity to share research or perspectives from both academics and amateurs on topics unique to the Northern Plains. As the largest annual humanities and (in more recent years) public affairs conference in the region, the event has tackled a range of topics, from cultural reconciliation, exploration, education, land and water issues, rural and urban identities, transportation, to the Civil War, World Wars, Korean and Vietnam Wars, Wounded Knee 1899 and 1973, the Spanish plains, religion and spirituality, health care and policy, women’s vote, immigration, and sustainable agriculture. The conference theme often takes its cue from the centennial of a major historical or cultural event and challenges presenters to interpret that topic for the present.
Through its publishing program, specifically a book about Dakota Territory and South Dakota governors, the center came to the attention of Sioux Falls resident Governor Nils Boe. Desirous of bringing national and world leaders to his home state after a term on the US Customs Court, in New York City, Boe established a lecture series in the Center for Western Studies under the direction of its university-community board of directors and assisted by a national advisory council. He and his sisters donated over $2 million to endow the series, which began in 1995 with General Colin Powell, who had recently retired as the first Black chairman of the joint chief of staffs. The forum has continued its groundbreaking emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the community by inviting women leaders—Queen Noor of Jordan, the first woman Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Ireland President Mary Robinson, and the first woman Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and Black leaders—Desmond Tutu, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Condoleezza Rice. Other speakers have included President George H. W. Bush, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexico President Vicente Fox, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, and iconic journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Keeping It Going
CWS is unique at Augustana in being officially established by the board of trustees, in 1970, yet responsible for staff and program costs. Although challenging for the first forty years, this ultimately served the center well. Self-reliance led to innovation and entrepreneurial initiative as the center continued to apply for and win many grants, notably from the Mary Chilton DAR Foundation, the South Dakota Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The most recent NEH grant, completed in 2013, aided the center in doubling its endowment at Augustana. Other endowments benefiting the center reside at the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation and First National Bank in Sioux Falls. A recent endowment push, honoring those who helped Krause create the center, raised $500,000—all of it through private donations—bringing the total endowment to over $10 million. With this substantial financial undergirding, the CWS has been able to help support allied cultural institutions, such as South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, South Dakota News Watch, twenty scholarly journal publications, and twelve professional associations, historical societies, and museums.
