On November 6th, I plan on going before the City of Sturgis and making an appeal that the City begins caring about our local history. Sturgis has a lot of great history, but the issue is that there hasn’t been a great push to preserve this history. When we lookRead More →
When I first started doing research into local history here in Sturgis, I gravitated to Poker Alice. There were a few reasons for that. One, I’ve always enjoyed doing research on women of the wild west. Their stories are often incredible, yet they don’t get the coverage that others do.Read More →
Throughout history, boundaries can change quite frequently. This can cause some interesting challenges when dealing with genealogies. And then because its history, things can get even more complicated due to various migrations of people, the various cultural enclaves in different areas, as well as restrictions placed on different peoples. InRead More →
Reworking History Often people imagine history as being written in stone. That history simply is, and that it doesn’t change. In part they are right, history doesn’t change, but our understanding of history does. This change in our understanding can occur in a variety of different ways. Often it isRead More →
There are many good reasons to get married. Love is one that is on top of that list. And if the marriage is based on good reasons, then it has a higher chance of lasting. Being forced to be married because you started a relationship with your bunkmate, probably isn’tRead More →
There are many reasons why a wedding may be called off. Finding out that your beautiful wife to be is actually a man, that would be one of those reasons. That is the situation Roscoe Billman found himself in in March of 1907. But Roscoe wouldn’t have to call theRead More →
Upon his death, the city of Lead mourned the passing of one of its most esteemed citizens. He, along with his wife, were known to be some of the most charitable residents of the town. Yet today, they have largely been regulated to the past, a brief memory only tracesRead More →
History is often a mystery. It isn’t always a straightforward ordeal. One can almost describe it like a collection of puzzles. Some of the puzzles have all the pieces, and are packaged in a nice little box. Other puzzles appear as if a toddler found the collection and decided toRead More →
When I first got into the Poker Alice story, I figured it was an easy way to deep my toes into local history. I’ve researched and written a lot about other women of the old west, and expected some difficulties, but not what I found with Alice. Part of theRead More →
What’s the quickest way to obtain a large number of wolf pelts? Stealing them, or at least that was the tactic used by South Dakota’s champion wolfer, William B. Werd. The fraud Werd committed would stretch across two states, multiple counties, and even got the Meade County Bank involved. Werd’sRead More →