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By
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Photographs
by
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Greg Latza
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The Missouri: South Dakota's River
Legend
by Bernie Hunhoff
The
Missouri: South Dakota’s River Legend is just the type of
work John Milton would have loved. I’m talking not about the English
poet but the John Milton who came from Minnesota to serve as professor
of English at the University of South Dakota.
South Dakota’s Milton despaired that we did not have enough artists
and writers interpreting rural life. The introduction to his history
titled South Dakota laments that images of a barren plains suffering
under extreme weather conditions have been burned into the nation’s
consciousness by visiting writers and photographers who never got to
know the true story. “Images once established are difficult to
change,” he wrote, while images of “the joys of spring mornings,
of birds nesting, of prairie flowers, and of clean air …. are
almost forgotten.”
That’s why I know Milton (both of them, in fact, the Englishman
and the South Dakotan), were they alive today, would enjoy Greg Latza’s
portrayal of the Missouri and the people and land of its broad valley.
Latza knows South Dakota. He grew up in the small town of Letcher, attended
S.D. State University in Brookings and worked in photojournalism for
the Sioux Falls Argus Leader before becoming a freelancer in 1997.
South Dakota is in his heart and soul. It shows in the way he uses his
camera. One of my favorite Greg Latza photographs (printed in another
book) is of the auction on Milton Overvaag’s farm. The photo shows
only the farmers’ shadows, ghostly against a rusting machine shed.
I would only have been taken by a person who understands that rural
people feel their mortality on farm sale days.
He does the same in The Missouri. All the beauty, optimism, grace and
humor that lives on and near the river is there for us to see; for the
world to see: The colourful, graceful Native American culture, the determined
farmers, the adventurus sportsmen –– and the birds and flowers
and spring mornings Milton wanted the world to see.
Milton liked to refer to the Missouri as The Big Road because, before
the dams, it was a thoroughfare for travelers. But the Missouri means
more to us than any hard road. Its economic, military, agricultural,
environmental. sporting and cultural implications have endured as long
as man has lived here. Flowing through seven states, the 2,341-mile
Missouri is the world's eighth longest river. It would rank third if
we could persuade mapmakers that the Mississippi is just its tributary.
But better bragging rights would not change the Missouri. The river
is bigger than hard facts. It is part of America's collective soul.
That’s why Latza’s photos –– and the fine essays
by longtime South Dakota journalist Kevin Woster that accompany them
–– take those of us who grew up along the river back in
time.
My brothers and I all were born at Yankton's Sacred Heart Hospital,
which sits on a chalkstone bluff above the river. We did a little fishing,
not much, in its waters. But we swam in its murky water, romanced girls
on the rocky shores, found summer jobs with the Corps of Engineers,
and proudly took visiting relatives past the massive Gavins Point Dam
power plant and the huge gates that gush foam when the Corps reduces
Lewis and Clark Lake and raises the river. An eccentric great-uncle
occasionally came from northern South Dakota to fish in the lake. He
caught catfish so big that they looked like passengers in the backseat
of his old Ford.
Married with two kids of my own, we camped under the big cottonwoods
by the lake. Every summer, we rejoined my brothers for outings by Fort
Randall, an hour's drive west. We also had a family reunion upriver
on Lake Oahe near Mobridge. The river is the river, no matter what stretch
you're on at the time. It feels the same whether I'm in Chamberlain
or Omaha or St. Louis. Call it camaraderie among river rats.
On one particular Fourth of July, our family was picnicking by Lewis
and Clark Lake when a young woman asked us to help find her missing
boy. She was calmly recruiting everyone. Some people searched up and
down the shore. Some combed the beach and the adjacent groves of trees.
Some walked through waist-deep water, hoping they would bump into nothing
softer than a rock or a beer bottle.
There was no panic. Surely, the boy would show up -- sleeping in the
backseat of a stranger's car or chasing butterflies in the trees. All
was calm. Then a young man's foot bumped into the boy under the water.
The man cradled the boy like a baby and carried him to the sand. A nurse
in a bathing suit gave him mouth-to-mouth. Medics arrived. They left
with the boy. His obituary was in the next day's paper. It all happened
quietly, with the sound of the waves loudly licking at the rocks.
We love the Missouri, but the Missouri is indifferent about us. It makes
itself felt to people who come near. It changes lives, usually as slowly
as it washes at a chalkstone bluff; other times, change floods in faster
than can be comprehended by the human mind. Despite our unequal relationship,
the river becomes part of our soul.
The river has always been rich with drama. Buffalo roamed its banks
in herds so huge they turned the banks brown as far as the eye could
see, according to early explorers. In winter, they crossed the river
on the ice. At times, their cumulative weight was too much and whole
herds fell into the icy water and died. When the river level is low,
a skull or bone sometimes surfaces in the sand.
Also buried in the river near Yankton is a steamboat called the Western.
It was sunk by an ice jam and flood in March of 1881. Like the buffalo
skulls, the Western sometimes reveals its skeleton in low water. Altogether,
about 30 such ships are buried between Yankton and Omaha. They were
not primitive, over-sized rafts but finely built ships that measured
over 200 feet in length and carried hundreds of tons of cargo to Dakota
Territory. If you believe local legend, the North Alabama, which went
down near Vermillion, was carrying treasure of some sort.
Before Gavins Point Dam created Lewis and Clark Lake, Yankton was known
as the city that hung Jack McCall in 1877, lost the territorial capital
in 1883 and replaced it with an institution for the mentally ill. The
lake was a badly needed bump. It started a tourism industry in a river
valley previously inhabited by ranchers, cows and those big catfish.
Houses were built in the hills north of the lake. The state built a
marina. Boats, some as big as small ships, dropped anchor. Restaurants,
shops and bait stops sprouted along Highway 52.
About 50 river miles from Yankton, in the extreme southeast corner of
South Dakota, the river -- and South Dakota's friendly tax climate --
attracted the creators of Dakota Dunes, one of America's most affluent
and newest communities. The new city makes Union County one of the nine
wealthiest in the United States. Million dollar homes and some of the
Midwest's best-known corporations have been built on the sandy riverside
soil.
Going upstream, however, economic benefits of the river -- pre- or post-dam
-- are less apparent. Though a tourism industry exists, it hasn't spread
Dunes-style prosperity. In fact, some of America's poorest families
live along and near the river valley on the Crow Creek, Lower Brule,
Standing Rock and Cheyenne Indian reservations.
Golf courses, hunting lodges, residential developments and other amenities
are taking root in the expansive landscape along the Missouri. In some
cases, tribal officials are initiating the development. In other places,
white ranchers and farmers are looking for ways to supplement their
income. Examples of both can be found in this book, like the farming
operations developed by the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes and Lee
and Trudy Qualm, who started a hunting lodge on their Platte farm.
Hilly, rocky land within a rifle shot of the Missouri often brings a
better price than the best Lincoln County corn ground. Yet, the men
and women who run cattle on that same land or use it to grow wheat are
being squeezed by the whims of Mother Nature and a world economy that
seldom rewards raw production, even when the product is food.
Despite its generally placid surface, the Missouri has been a valley
of controversy and adventure ever since Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark journeyed this way in 1804. The people and places you'll meet
on the following pages represent our river culture. Greg Latza and Kevin
Woster are sons of the state. South Dakotans are fortunate that the
two have been able to earn a living with their creative talents without
emigrating like so many of their contemporaries. Their photos and prose
remind me both of what the river was like before our time, and how today's
society is shaped by the ageless and watery road.
The small town mayors, family farmers, tribal leaders, sportsmen and
historians featured by Latza and Woster provide human drama to the river
valley. Altwin Grassrope comes from a long line of Lower Brule leaders.
Springfield Mayor Norm Schelske, a happy-go-lucky saloonkeeper by trade,
has been fighting to fix the sediment problem on Lewis and Clark Lake
for years. Bob Hipple was a legend in South Dakota newspapering; he
loved the river and his native state with passion, and with humility.
When the state's press association honored Hipple a few years before
his death, he modestly shrugged it off, saying he just happened to hang
around long enough to be noticed.
The same might be humbly said of the Missouri. As the years pass, we
gain a better appreciation for its importance in South Dakota. Meanwhile,
the river is indifferent. It acts as if it knows it will outlast us
all.
On a more positive note, Greg Latza’s The Missouri will dispel
myths about the landscape for readers who don’t live in South
Dakota. For the rest of us, it is a reminder of why we do.
© 2003 Bernie Hunhoff
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the Missouri by Greg Latza & Kevin Woster
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