Winter in Rapid City – 1973

Winter in Rapid City – 1973

 

By Don Barnett

Former Mayor of Rapid City

 

Don Barnett (courtesy photo)

 

 

RAPID CITY – At this moment of optimism at the dawn of another beautiful fall in South

Dakota, and as we remember that terrible and tragic shock some ten years ago when South Dakota lost its decent and dedicated Governor George Michelson, it might be wise to review another moment in South Dakota’s recent history when all of us were tested to the maximum.

The period from January through March of 1973 was, perhaps, onc of the most challenging and historically significant periods in the history of Rapid City. Before I expand on this comment, I’d like to define that period with a little historical perspective. The flood in June of 1972 had occurred roughly seven months before the first incidents involving civil disobedience happened in Rapid City during the following winter. However, even with the grief from the loss of life, the turmoil during the months following the flood, and a less than banner year for regional tourism, things were moving.

Funds were accumulating in the city treasury to pay for the long-promised civic center. Mr. Arndt Dahl and his family had announced their commitment to provide funding for the Dahl Fine Arts Center. The City was making plans to demolish the old City Auditorium at 7th and Quincy. Forthright men and women on the library board, with unanimous support from the 10 members of the City Council, had arranged for financing and construction of the new Library at 6th and Quincy.

This was not an accident. Mrs., Faye Crawford, State Representative Stanford Adelstein, Bill Porter, Jim Kuehn, Curt Ireland and other progressive members of The Library Board had devised a creative method to fund the new library, many “brick and mortar” activities were becoming a new reality in the city.

However, there seemed to be simmering unrest just below the surface involving race relations. Within a few days after the violence in Buffalo Gap (a fight in a bar that resulted in the death of Mr., Wesley Bad Heart Bull) and the related activities and violence at the Custer County Courthouse, dozens of the national reporters returned to the Black Hills and again focused their attention on Rapid City. As the passions became more heated and the demonstrations larger, more national reporters arrived. From that moment forward, until the takeover of Wounded Knee by members of the American Indian Movement and other protesters, those of us serving as locally elected public servants faced a challenge that was, in many ways, even worse than the flood had been the previous June.

I had lived in Rapid City since age four and still retain many fond memories of my early years in the city. The Barnett family lived on West Rapid Street, immediately behind (north of) the old Black Hills Power and Light Company Power Plant (Now Black Hills Gold). We had wonderful neighbors, very close relationships, Mr. And Mrs. George Miller’s apple orchard (where it was always fun to snatch a few green apples), and my sisters and I never missed a meal. Dad worked for the local power company and mom worked for Mills Drug Store, when my sisters and I went to college.

 

 

Each fall, several dozen families of Native Americans would bring their families (via old wooden horse-drawn wagons and on horseback) to Rapid City, traveled up old Highway 40 through Scenic (passing the airport) from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and camped on the land that was owned by the Lamm family on the south side of Rapid Creek, just in front of the BIack Hills Packing Plant, on Omaha Street (when it was a gravel two-lane street). They lived in small little homes and tents, watered their ponies in Rapid Creek, picked up odd jobs around town, and sent their children to the Rapid City schools. Many of their children were my playmates, and we walked together the three or four blocks to “New Lincoln” Elementary School at the base of Skyline Drive at Quincy and West Street (after Old Lincoln School at 9th and St. Joe Street was torn down, and the site was purchased by the First National Bank). The area where the Indian families lived was called Sioux Addition. I remember hiding and playing on M Hill and Cowboy Hill, fishing in Rapid Creek, and enjoying my friends from the reservation. As I grew older, Jerry Schroener (now former State Senator and with over 30 years of service and dedication to his hometown) gave me a job as a paperboy, and I delivered the Rapid City Daily

.Journal to the homes in Sioux Addition and my neighborhood after school and on the weekends. My family and I couldn’t see anything wrong with Sioux Addition.

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