- This is a production of SDPB.

- History lives on in South Dakota from a mining town's rise from the ashes to a little house on the prairie.

Visitors find meaning and locals make a living from the lives of those who came before.

- Being able to share history past whatever it may be, is really powerful for helping us understand where we're going.

I think everybody wants to learn more about what happens so that we can all make better decisions and have context for why decisions were made in the past.

- The allure of history and the stories that haunt us.

That's tonight's South Dakota Focus.

- South Dakota focus is made possible with help from our members.

Thank you.

And by Black Hills State University and Cody, Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park.

Each summer for the past 50 years, families gather on the prairie for a glimpse into the pioneer past.

- So good evening and welcome everyone to the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant.

- The Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant in De Smet celebrates the stories from the Little house on the Prairie Series.

It captured the imagination of generations of fans throughout the world.

Ann Lesch is on the board of directors for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant.

She's also operations manager for the Ingalls homestead.

We meet in the small prairie Church on the homestead the weekend of the 53rd annual pageant.

We're sitting in this beautiful church.

Can you tell me a little bit about it?

- Yeah.

This is the West Bethany Lutheran Church.

It sits in the northwest corner of the Ingalls homestead, and that is the land that Charles Ingalls earned through the Homestead Act.

And it didn't originally sit here, we moved it here in 2008, but it is, it's at about 10 miles north of here.

Churches and schools were some of the first things that communities built when they came out.

People came out to Homestead and settled this part of South Dakota.

And so we have two different schoolhouses on the property as well as this church to help tell that story of community building.

- Much of the Little House on the Prairie series was set on this very homestead where Charles Ingalls paw staked his claim.

This year.

He's played by an engineering student from South Dakota State University in a new production Prairie Girl, Laura's Dakota Stories.

- Well, A job that'd be wonderful.

- For many years we told the stories that were directly from the books, but what we've done with these scripts is tell those same stories, but through the eyes of Laura as she's writing it and editing the books with her daughter Rose and their relationship as a writer and editor mother daughter is pretty unique in American history to have that kind of relationship and literature.

- I think the way you made the chapter, The Wonderful Afternoon is exactly what I was trying to explain to you.

You mustn't tell the reader of the experience, but show them.

- And so we have excerpts from the letters and then the discussion and dialogue between Laura and Rose, and then we act out.

That's part of the scene of the story.

So it's kind of a unique angle and the visitors who've come this year for the pageant are really enjoying it.

- The pageant and connection to one of the country's most famous authors is a significant tourist draw for De Smet, but it's not the only one.

So like I keep thinking about a, a couple months ago we picked up a De Smet brochure and I can't remember all the things it had across the top, but it was like hunting, fishing, something else, Laura.

- Yep.

Well, we do have wonderful hunting and fishing in De Smet too.

We're closely, we, we sit very close to Lake Thompson and Lake Henry, the Twin Lakes and Laura actually wrote about those lakes.

We also have sloughs and prairies, all kinds of wonderful habitat for pheasants.

And so the Laura visitors might not be rolling in as the fall, you know, or fewer of them rolling in in September, October, November.

But of course that's when the pheasant season starts in October and stuff.

And we see a lot of pheasant hunters that come through our area.

So it's really important to our community as well.

- Thanks to a local industrial park and agriculture, a more diverse local economy helps De Smet maneuver the workforce shortages that plague other tourism communities.

Jamie Lancaster is the executive director of the De Smet Economic Development Corporation.

He admits more seasonal businesses still struggle to find adequate workforce.

- But what we found is if we can attract families that somebody in the family can work in more of our year-round businesses, and then there's more people to teenagers and and spouses that maybe came here because their, their spouse had a more full-time job that they can help with those service industry and and type of things.

My my oldest daughter, she works for the Memorial Society, so she's doing the historic tours over the summer and so, you know, she has school, but during the summer she's free.

So she's able to do those, those types of things.

So there's, there's actually a relation more of a relationship between tourism and our agriculture and our industrial than, than just, you know, sitting next to each other.

- But it's worth noting how the Lancasters ended up here.

- So I was pastoring a, a church in Omaha, Nebraska.

And so my family and I, we would come up to De Smet.

I have four girls and, and they love Laura Ingalls Wilder.

And so we came up to visit and we camped on the prairie and, and really just fell in love with the community, - The stories of family, community and resilience in the Little House series enthrall, thousands of visitors a year.

Others are interested in the not so distant history of settlers on the prairie l herself.

A student of history says engaging visitors', curiosity is key.

- I think there's been a big push in De Smet but not just De Smet in museums and cultural institutions in general over the last 10 to 20 years to make things more experience-based more on.

And so that has been true here at the Ingalls Homestead.

Everything we do at the Ingalls Homestead is activity based.

You can drive the covered wagon, you can wash clothes, you can use a hand, water pump, all of that kind of stuff.

And for the pageant specifically, we are in our second half century now.

We're in our second 50 years.

And so we've put a lot of thought into how is it that we can keep this community tradition, this sharing of stories and history alive and fresh for people.

And so the new script that we have this year, that new angle on it, that is really one of the aspects of it, including things like our cemetery tour, creating these experiences for people where they can dive a little bit deeper into the history.

- The cemetery tour began as a new offering for the 50th anniversary of the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant.

The De Smet Cemetery is the final resting place of Laura's parents, her three sisters and the baby boy.

She lost and remembers in the book the Long Winter.

- It's a reader's theater style.

So we have actors and a lot of them are actors from the pageant or community members who, and we select different community members each year, and it really resonated with people.

It's, we do it on the Saturdays of the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant.

I think we're gonna continue doing it as long as we can, but it allows us to highlight the Ingalls family.

We always choose one or two of the Ingalls family members, but it also allows us to highlight some of those other community members that either were featured in the books, but just a little bit, or were not featured in the books because of the way Laura wrote the books where she kind of condensed characters together, left things out, you know, she really crafted stories rather than just told history.

And so that's a nice way for us to be able to present some of that history as well.

- The success of the Dis Met Cemetery tours in tandem with the annual pageant demonstrates a strange sort of irony.

Burial sites have a way of bringing history to life across the state.

Deadwood is home to one of the West's most famous cemeteries, thanks to a few VIPs.

- Mount Moriah Cemetery was, was founded in 1878, 2 years after Deadwood.

The original cemetery was down the hill, but it was on flatter ground, so they needed that for development and moved some of the bodies up here, including one of the most famous in Deadwood's history, if not Wild West Wild Bill Hickok.

And he's buried in this cemetery right beside Calamity Jane, who died in 1903.

And we have Preacher Smith and Seth Bullock and, and a variety of other legends here.

Dora DuFran, who is a, a madam along with their parrot Fred, are buried in this cemetery.

And it's just a beautiful sacred ground, but it is a tourist attraction.

We get about a hundred to 120,000 visitors a year that come up and, and pay homage to our old west legends.

But while they're here, they're wandering around, you'll see wildlife in the cemetery.

And so people are drawn to those historic graves of celebrities.

And, and while Bill Hickok is and was a celebrity, - While Bill Hickok was a union scout US Marshall and part of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, he's easily one of Deadwood's most famous residents, but he was in town barely a month before he was shot in the back by Jack McCall during a poker game.

This archival episode of SDPb's Images of the Past tells the story from there.

- Mount Moriah Cemetery stands his living proof that the dead Wild Bill was more valuable to Deadwood than a live one.

While Bill's reburial on Mount Moriah in 1879 was accompanied with great ceremony, old friends Colorado Charlie and Steve Utter returned to assist by the 1890s.

Wild Bill's grave was a major Deadwood attraction, the wooden head bird on his grave was hacked to pieces by souvenir hunters, surrounded by an iron fence, a bust of Wild Bill and a stone pedestal replaced it.

This was also soon vandalized.

Almost everyone that seemed wanted a piece of wild bill, - A full sized statue surrounded by even higher fences was also vandalized by the end of World War ii.

Today's bronze bust was unveiled in 2002, corresponding with the completion of the Mount Moriah Restoration project.

It remains one of Kevin Kuchenbecker's favorite of the historic grave sites, along with his current role as the city's planning, zoning and historic preservation.

Officer, Kuchenbecker served as the sexton of Mount Moriah Cemetery.

It's been closed for new burials for 75 years.

He says the $2 entrance fee from visitors funds the cemetery's maintenance.

These visitors are engaging in a particular genre of tourism.

- Heritage tourism is a segment of overall tourism where people come to historic sites, they're drawn to the history, whether it's a historic cemetery like we're sitting in here today, or just Deadwood in general, you know, where it's a national historic landmark.

It's been designated that in July 4th, 1961.

And Deadwood has always looked at its history as it promoted itself.

And so we get about 4 million visits a year from around the globe that are coming to, to see Deadwood - Heritage Tourism partners with another industry to keep visitors coming to Deadwood.

George Milos is the executive director of the Deadwood Gaming Association.

He says the city's relationship to gambling is intertwined with its Wild West history.

- Well, I think we can go back as far as 1876.

I mean, Wild Bill Hickok getting shot while playing poker in Deadwood basically made the town, - But the city's luck would vary.

Fires and floods have wreaked havoc on Deadwood and its infrastructure.

Basically, since its founding in 1987, a fire raged in Deadwood's, downtown firefighters managed to save Main Street, including Saloon Number 10, the site of Wild Bill's murder, but other historic buildings were lost.

It was the last straw.

City leaders proposed limited stakes gambling as a funding mechanism for historic preservation.

- So they created a group called Deadwood, you bet.

And it was a group of about eight individuals that went out and got 30,000 signatures and took it to a statewide vote.

And it won almost by a three to one margin.

60 some percent of the vote voted to offer limited stakes gaming in Deadwood.

So in November of 1989, the experiment started, you know, a $5 betting limit with the purpose of raising money to fix the infrastructure and preserve the historical integrity of the town.

Long story short.

- Deadwood was just the third jurisdiction in the United States to legalize gambling after the state of Nevada and Atlantic City.

Today, Deadwood's gaming industry supports more than 2000 jobs.

That's more than the city's population - Since 1989.

There's been about $29 billion waged in Deadwood.

26 billion has been paid back to the customer and about 2.6 billion in gross revenues for the industry itself here in Deadwood.

So it's been a big part of the community.

We've been able to change the infrastructure.

We've been able to allow grants to create new facades for the, for the buildings and for the frontage.

As a resident of Deadwood, we get grants for paint, for windows, for siding, for lifesaving things like heat and, and water and things like that.

So it really has been a boon to the Deadwood community.

- The Deadwood Gaming Association represents the industry's interests before the legislature and other governing bodies.

It recently supported a state constitutional amendment to legalize sports betting in Deadwood, which voters approved in 2020.

Milos says it's one more attraction to keep visitors coming back.

- So our focus is just to stay up on technology to, you know, provide the best possible visit for our customers.

And the one advantage that we have is that we have to continue to provide at and historic atmosphere for the customer.

You can go anywhere and gamble.

You can't go anywhere and, and watch Wild Bill get shot three times a day.

- Historic preservation is our economic engine.

We're able through the gaming revenues, fund rehabilitation of both private homes in the city of Deadwood and help support business renovations on the exterior of the buildings in the historic district as well.

So it's a hand in hand relationship between gaming and preservation.

- The allure of the Old West still entices visitors from around the globe, but deadwood's violent history and years of unexplained experiences leads many to believe some of those early settlers never really left.

- Well.

Here's the deal.

I I think you could ask anybody that's lived in Deadwood, what they've seen, what they've heard, and everybody's got a story.

I've got, I've got friends that have stayed at the Bach Hotel for the simple reason they live in Deadwood, but they, they wanna stay at the, at the Bach Hotel to see a ghost.

We've had bands in town and we put 'em up at the Franklin Hotel and I've had a, the lead singer call me in the middle of the night and say, I can't stay here.

There's ghosts everywhere.

So we had to move up to a new hotel in the middle of the night.

These are true stories.

I worked at Deadwood Mountain Grand, I worked in the event center every time I was there at three, four o'clock in the morning.

Doors are slamming, lights are swinging.

It's, it's something that's here.

And whether you believe it or not, if you spend enough time in Deadwood, you're gonna come across something.

- Tour guide Kim Ferrel-Keehn has come across plenty of ghost stories in her years in Deadwood.

She leads the HauntedHistory walking tour of Historic Deadwood, which begins with General Custer's illegal exploration of the Black Hills and the gold rush that followed.

- So the Black Hills was part of the Great Sioux Indian Reservation till 1874.

Custer got here, they found gold.

It went viral all over the world.

The Chicago newspaper said there's a 50 mile belt of gold found.

There's gold in the grass by the horse's feet.

This canyon filled up with people.

Some accounts say 10,000, some say 25,000.

Either way, this gulch was full of people, livestock, freight wagons.

They said mud and sewage up to your knees.

You could smell Deadwood 10 miles away.

Lots of, well, they were all here illegally.

They were on an Indian reservation.

There was no jurisdiction for law.

The first citizens were pretty much the criminal element, outlaws gunslingers prostitutes.

So lots of stories of violence, untimely death, and always seems to be stories of hauntings that follow that.

- It is mostly a history tour.

But ?Ferrel-Keehn also shares local stories of specters and unexplained phenomena.

- So I had two different people on two different tours tell me that this piano plays by itself.

And I hadn't checked it out.

So I I did.

And they told me that it does play by itself.

And the reason it's in the window, it was in the manager's office and it was creeping her out.

So it's in the window now and it's, it doesn't play like a song, it's just the keys will go down - Over the hour long tour.

Ferrel-Keehn shares a history of Deadwood based on her own research of books and newspaper archives about the mining town's violent past.

The stories include fires, shootouts, public hangings, a severed head floating down the creek after a flood.

There are more than a few stories of women working as prostitutes and dancers murdered by jealous men.

Keehn recalls a newspaper investigation of hauntings in the Lone Star Saloon, which has long since been destroyed in a fire.

- So onto another ghost story, the building with the black awnings down there.

That was just a parking lot a couple years ago, but I believe it was the site of the Lone Star Saloon.

And in 1877 there were so many reports of hauntings from the upstairs tenants.

The newspaper stepped in and did an investigation and they were the know all, be all of the day.

What they reported was a woman comely, if not beautiful, and always behind her, the shadow of the man who was the cause of their double deaths in the still Watch of the night.

The Phantom still tread the stairs where they once lived and held each other and loving embrace, and then they just fade away into the night.

- These phantoms are thought to be Kitty LeRoy, a famous dancer and her husband, Sam Curley.

- Sam got called to Denver on business.

Kitty got back together with her ex while he was gone.

So when he heard about it, he came back to town.

He, there was a bar downstairs, he told at the Lone Star, he told the bartender that he came back to kill Kitty.

Her Paramore and himself, - The Black Hills Weekly Times reported the gory details of the murder, suicide, including a double funeral the following day with blood still on the floor.

Sam and Kitty were among the bodies moved from the original cemetery to Mount Moriah.

- They didn't get all the graves.

I think the last one, I believe it was around 2015, was found in someone's yard.

It was the second grave found in their yard.

- Oh wow.

- So my son lives in that neighborhood.

I always tell him, just don't dig.

- The final location of Sam and Kitty's Graves is unknown Today as we finish the tour, Ferrel Keehn shares photos from past visitors, a reflection of a child's face when there were no children in the group.

A photo taken by a local bartender of shadowy figures past closing time.

- So in closing, when you have a town like Deadwood with 10,000 transient people and all the violence that went on here, there's no way of knowing who all these hauntings are.

But my, they say that the spirit world is just on a different frequency than we are.

My favorite analogy, if you had a fan sitting here and the fan was off, you would see the blades of the fan.

If you turn the fan on, the blades are still there.

You just don't see 'em anymore.

And that's kind of how it is between us and the spirit world.

So it's probably not that unusual that we bump into each other now and then - Ferrel-Keehn believes history is a ghost story and there might be something to that.

The hauntings in Deadwood reflect some of the worst impulses of humanity, greed, jealousy, revenge.

The history of this region, good and bad, affects us still today.

Like the wind from a fan.

- Montana had found gold before the Black Hills.

You had California finding gold before the Black Hills, and then you had the great panic of 1873.

Custer comes in in 74 and finds gold and then you have this gold rush here.

And so it makes this part of the United States special.

Unfortunately, there was the violation of the treaties with, of the Lakota.

We were trespassing at the time.

But that all interweaves into a fabulous story to that we all as Americans, should understand how we got where we are today.

And, and so I think that's part of the, the attraction to the Old West, especially Deadwood.

- The same is true in Desme, where the pioneer stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder are in conversation with critiques of westward expansion.

Ann Lesch is glad to see a nuanced reflection on these stories.

- Laura's books are historical fiction because she changes things and she truly crafted them into stories because history is messy.

But that's what's allowing us to explore it more.

And dis cement, right?

But she leaves things out of the books and she adds things into the books and she plays with timelines and all of that kind of stuff is a crafting of stories, which, what makes it compelling.

We're drawn to stories as humans.

So I think her ability to take her childhood experiences and really the changes she saw throughout her childhood and her lifetime and craft them into stories is something that resonates with people because that human aspect is there.

That desire to make things better and move forward and overcome challenges.

A lot of her books focus on how are we gonna survive?

How are we over gonna overcome these challenges?

And those are just compelling stories that we're all drawn to.

And you can find them all throughout the state.

- I'm sure you've noticed there's a big piece of South Dakota's story we left out of this episode.

Native American tourism is a complicated and evolving industry of its own.

We'll learn how indigenous perspectives of South Dakota's past and present are shared with visitors both on and off tribal lands.

Next time.