South Dakota has always had an intermittent relationship with prohibition. Constantly changing legislation kept citizens, saloonkeepers, bootleggers and other scofflaws on tenterhooks, wondering what might come next. The scandalous indiscretions of the lethal Verne Miller and the contributions of "agents of change" like Senators Norbeck and Senn kept ne'er-do-wells on edge. In 1927, the double murder of prohibition officers near Redfield dominated headlines. From the Black Hills stills of Bert Miller to the Sioux Falls moonshine outfit buried under Lon Vaught's chicken house, uncork these oft-overlooked and tumultuous eighteen years in state history. In the first book of its kind, award-winning journalist Chuck Cecil delivers the boisterous details of an intoxicating era.

The story of South Dakota prohibition years 1917 to 1935

South Dakota has always had an intermittent relationship with prohibition. Constantly changing legislation kept citizens, saloonkeepers, bootleggers and other scofflaws on tenterhooks, wondering what might come next. The scandalous indiscretions of the lethal Verne Miller and the contributions of "agents of change" like Senators Norbeck and Senn kept ne'er-do-wells on edge. In 1927, the double murder of prohibition officers near Redfield dominated headlines. From the Black Hills stills of Bert Miller to the Sioux Falls moonshine outfit buried under Lon Vaught's chicken house, uncork these oft-overlooked and tumultuous eighteen years in state history. In the first book of its kind, award-winning journalist Chuck Cecil delivers the boisterous details of an intoxicating era.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2023 "Sharply insightful . . . A monumental piece of work."—The Boston Globe An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.

A startling rise and retreat In the 1920s, a reborn Ku Klux Klan slithered into South Dakota. Bold at times, the group intimidated citizens in every county. KKK anti-Catholicism sentiment resulted in the murder of Father Arthur Belknap of Lead. Idealized Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore, operated as a white supremacist and KKK leader. In 1925, animosity between the KKK and Fort Meade soldiers came to a clash one night in Sturgis. The clatter of two borrowed .30 caliber Browning cooled machine guns split the air over the heads of a Klan gathering across the valley. Author Arley Fadness follows the Klan's trail throughout the Rushmore state.

Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.

... To find out how life is lived along an international border, author Thomas O'Neill and photographer Michael Yamashita traveled the length of the line, from the fishing villages on Passamaquoddy Bay to the rain forest of Vancouver Island. They explored buoyant Toronto and Vancouver, and face-to-face border towns such as Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. They met a diverse human gallery: proud Madawaskans, clinging to their French heritage along the St. John River; German-speaking Hutterites creating showplace communal farms on the open plains; Osoyoos Indians leading a wine-making revolution in British Columbia ... Much more than just a line on a map, the U.S.-Canadian border and its neighborhoods provide a living stage where the geography and peoples of two great nations come into lasting focus.