In August 1924, Sturgis residents were invited to a public gathering with speakers, food stands, and entertainment for the whole family. Everyone was welcome, the organizers announced. The invitation came from the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that claimed to defend American values while working to exclude Americans on the basis of religion, ancestry, and race.
The gathering was scheduled for August 23. Signs directed visitors into town, and the day ended with burning crosses and illuminated Klan symbols on the hills. Historian Charles Rambow later described the event in a study of the Klan in the Black Hills, drawing on the Sturgis Weekly Record and interviews with people who remembered those years. His account shows a movement that was not hiding its presence. It was inviting the public to come and see it.
The Klan that reached Sturgis belonged to the movement’s twentieth-century revival, rather than its original post–Civil War incarnation. Revived in 1915, the second Klan spread through northern and western states during the early 1920s. It appealed especially to white, native-born Protestants, offering fellowship and a promise to defend patriotism, morality, and law and order. Those appeals came with hostility toward Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and Black Americans. The movement found ways to make its prejudices sound like ordinary civic concerns.
The Klan reaches the Black Hills
Recruiting in the region began before the Sturgis gathering. In October 1923, Spearfish’s Queen City Mail reprinted an account from the Rapid City Guide describing a visit by Henry Baldwin, a Klan recruiter from Norfolk, Nebraska. Four men reportedly paid $7.50 each to join. The group intended to burn a cross, but postponed the display because it had not yet received a charter. Even before a local chapter was formally organized, recruiters were already seeking members.
By February 1924, reports of Klan activity were circulating elsewhere in South Dakota. One story from Redfield claimed more than 2,000 members along the Dakota division of the Chicago and North Western Railway. The organization had become a subject of public discussion well beyond the Black Hills.
Its most visible symbol appeared at night. Burning crosses were reported on Lookout Mountain near Spearfish, above Lead, and on hills around other communities. In April, a cross on Brown Rocks drew the attention of Deadwood residents and firefighters. The firefighters went beyond putting out the flames. On a motion by former chief Francis J. Parker, the department condemned the Klan as un-American and called for the removal of any member who belonged to it. While Klansmen claimed to be defending the country, the Deadwood firefighters publicly rejected that claim.
Newspapers also reported a burning cross in Sturgis that spring, along with talk of hooded figures in the city park. By August, the Klan was no longer represented in town merely by reports of nighttime displays. It was organizing an event under its own name.
The August gathering
The Klan called the event a Klonklave. Its advertisement invited families to listen to speakers explain the order’s principles and enjoy the day’s entertainment. The program combined recruitment with the familiar attractions of a community gathering: food, speeches, ceremony, and a chance to socialize.
According to Rambow, the Sturgis Weekly Record estimated that between 4,000 and 8,000 Klansmen and Klanswomen attended. Richard B. Williams, whom Rambow interviewed years later, recalled a total crowd of perhaps 25,000 to 30,000, including spectators. Whether people came as members, supporters, or simply to watch, the event drew a remarkable audience for a town the size of Sturgis.
The evening provided the spectacle. Rambow’s interviewees remembered automobiles illuminating the grounds, dynamite blasts, and three crosses set alight. Large Klan initials were burned on a hillside above the gathering. The organization associated with hoods, secrecy, and intimidation had turned those same symbols into a public performance, with thousands of people there to witness it.
Religion and the neighbors caught between
Much of the Klan’s appeal in the Black Hills rested on anti-Catholic sentiment. In Sturgis, that hostility had an immediate local target. St. Martin’s Academy was part of the town’s Catholic community, and warnings about Catholic influence were therefore directed at institutions that local families knew well. For Catholics, the Klan’s campaign was not an abstract argument about religion. It reached into the schools, churches, and relationships that shaped daily life.
People interviewed by Rambow remembered crosses burning on Sly and Glover Hills, visible from St. Martin’s, as well as large Klan initials lighting the hills above town. He also recorded accounts of Catholic residents responding to these displays and of confrontations near Marcus, east of Sturgis.
Yet the religious divisions were not as simple as Protestant supporters on one side and Catholic opponents on the other. Rambow described Father Columban Bregenzer of St. Martin’s working with Presbyterian minister C. D. Erskine and other local figures to prevent tensions from escalating. He also recorded occasions when robed Klansmen entered Erskine’s church and presented money to the congregation. The Klan’s presence created difficulties that crossed denominational lines, even as its rhetoric singled out Catholics.
The organization also entered the ordinary social life of the region. Rambow’s interviewees remembered picnics, gatherings in buildings in the Bear Butte Valley, and activities organized by Klan women. These occasions helped members build relationships and brought the movement into contact with entire families. The Klan was not sustained by burning crosses alone. It also offered people a community to belong to, provided they fit its definition of who belonged.
A movement beyond Sturgis
Sturgis was one stop in a larger regional campaign. In October 1924, the Deadwood Telegram reported that roughly 800 people attended a Klan address at the city auditorium. The speaker identified himself as a Baptist minister and had traveled from Sturgis. Klan messages were being delivered not only from hillsides at night but from public stages in the middle of town.
The gatherings continued. Rambow described a Klan event at Belle Fourche on July 4, 1925, and a notice in the Rapid City Journal three days later mentioned someone returning from the meeting. In October 1926, the same newspaper carried a paid advertisement inviting men and women to join Gateway Klan No. 2, Realm of South Dakota. The Klan was still recruiting openly in the Black Hills more than two years after the Sturgis gathering.
Nationally, the second Klan declined as scandals, internal disputes, and public opposition weakened it. Its influence in the Black Hills also faded, though the memories of its gatherings and cross burnings remained. Rambow’s interviews, conducted decades afterward, preserved a history that had already begun to slip from public view.
The August 1924 gathering is memorable not only for the size of its crowd or the crosses burning above Sturgis. It shows how the Klan tried to become part of ordinary community life. The same movement that intimidated Catholic neighbors invited families to spend a day listening to speeches and enjoying entertainment. Some residents joined it, others came to watch, and others openly opposed what it stood for. The people of Sturgis did not respond with one voice. But for a day in August, the Klan believed it could present itself to the town as a respectable American organization, and it had an audience willing to hear it.
Sources
Charles Rambow, “The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Concentration on the Black Hills,” South Dakota History 4, no. 1 (1973): 63–81, esp. 76–79. Rambow cites the Sturgis Weekly Record, August 21 and 28, 1924, and interviews with Richard B. Williams and other residents.
Queen City Mail, October 24, 1923, p. 3, reprinting the Rapid City Guide account of a recruiting visit.
Weekly Pioneer-Times, February 28, 1924, p. 1, report from Redfield on Klan recruitment.
Lead Daily Call, April 15, 1924, p. 1; Weekly Pioneer-Times, April 17, 1924, p. 2; Weekly Pioneer-Times, April 24, 1924, p. 3; Lead Daily Call, July 26, 1924, p. 1.
Rambow, “The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” 74–79.
Deadwood Telegram, October 20, 1924, p. 1.
Rambow, “The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” 78–79; Rapid City Journal, July 7, 1925, p. 8; Rapid City Journal, October 29, 1926, p. 8.