Grandma Betty, the Hotel Alex Johnson, and the faces that never left

RAPID CITY – On a breezy but unseasonably warm February Saturday in Rapid City, a small family gathering for an 86th birthday became an awakening in the lobby of the Hotel Alex Johnson.

For Betty Handley, a descendant of Sitting Bull, known as White Bear Woman in Lakota, the event was far more than just another birthday celebration. Her grandchildren, who affectionately call her Grandma Betty, joined her in returning to a building that has quietly sheltered the history and stories of Lakota families through generations. For many, the hotel isn’t just an historic downtown landmark but is a living archive of Lakota memory.

Handley was one of many whose childhood memories significantly feature the Alex Johnson. Built in 1928, Native Americans have been an integral part of the hotel’s workforce filling many of the essential service roles, including housekeeping, laundry, and maintenance. Many Lakota families view the hotel as a hub for employment during periods when other local businesses practiced discriminatory hiring.

Despite his public admiration for Lakota culture, Alex Carlton Johnson’s personal fortune and accomplishments as President of the Chicago & North Western Railroad were closely tied to the expansion of the railroad. This progress, however, came at a significant cost: the seizure of Lakota lands was essential to laying the railroad’s tracks. Johnson’s success cannot be separated from the dispossession experienced by the Lakota people as their ancestral territories were appropriated to make way for the railroad’s construction.

Standing beside his grandmother, Christopher Piña wanted to acknowledge this history. “Today, I’m the voice of those who were silenced. I carry the light that stops the shadow. The breath in my lungs is a gift from the Creator intended to speak the truth of White Bear Woman. I do not stand alone. The giants of the Alex Johnson stand behind me.”

Piña is making reference to the sculpted Native American heads on the hotel’s main entrance. The heads were modeled after the designs found on historic Indian-head nickels and pennies. These sculptures are integrated into a Germanic Tudor exterior. The theme continues in the interior featuring eight plaster-cast busts of Native American men, teepee symbols, the sacred Four Directions in the lobby tiles, Sioux patterns, and more. The hotel has been under renovation for some time, but the details of the lobby and the façade have been preserved as part of its National Register of Historic Places status.

Piña’s family gathered around a cluster of chairs near the fireplace in the lobby. Grandma Betty shared fond memories of when her mother, Luella Hayes, worked in the hotel. Her mother came to Rapid City around 1904, escaping an abusive husband and finding refuge at the Osh Kosh camp nearby. “She used to come in the back door,” recalled Grandma Betty. “She walked in the alley, came in the back door and then would go upstairs. She was in maintenance. When she finished, she walked home again.”

For families like Grandma Betty’s, the Alex Johnson was never just a workplace — it was part of a larger landscape of survival that stretched from the hotel’s back door to the banks of Rapid Creek. Long before Rapid City grew into the city it is today, Lakota families lived in a cluster of canvas tents and small wood frame shelters along the water. Locals called it the Osh Kosh camp. For Native families, it was simply “camp,” a place where relatives gathered, shared food, watched over one another’s children, and built a community in the margins of a town that offered little welcome.

The camp sat within walking distance of the hotel, and for many Lakota workers — including Grandma Betty’s mother, Luella Hayes — it was the only housing available. The creek provided water, willows, and a sense of continuity with the land, even as the city pressed in around them. Children played along the banks while their parents walked to work in town, often entering through alleys and back doors, as Luella did. The camp was humble, but it was held together by kinship, generosity, and the quiet determination of families who refused to disappear.

Though the city eventually pushed the camp out through ordinances, development, and the slow tightening of space along the creek, its memory remains woven into the stories of those who lived there. For Grandma Betty, returning to the Alex Johnson is also a return to that earlier world — to the footsteps of her mother walking from the camp to the hotel, to the community that helped raise her, and to the faces carved into the stone that have watched generations of Lakota people come and go.

Grandma Betty said her mother would spend all day washing dishes. One of the youngest of eight children, Grandma Betty said she would help. “I would help her because she was getting up there in age.”

Community support made survival possible. A local lumber man offered materials so Native families could build small one- or two-room homes and even installed a water pump so they would have access to water. “I just want everybody to have a place,” he told them.

Pina called it an historic homecoming. “It was not just a birthday celebration. It was a ceremonial rematriation of a building that has long stood as a shrine to Lakota culture while often overlooking the living people who sustained it.”

In the shadow of the hotel’s stone faces, these intertwined stories of endurance, migration, and quiet resistance reclaim the building as more than a tourist landmark. For Grandma Betty and her descendants, it is both a site of historical harm and a place of return—a reminder that the heartbeat of this land has always been Lakota.

(Contact Marnie Cook at cookm8715@gmail.com)

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