(bright music) - [Announcer] This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

This program is made possible with your support and with corporate support from High Plains Western Heritage Center and South Dakota Historical Society Press and by South Dakota Mines Metallurgical Engineering Program, where the science of art and materials collide.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] A monument in South Dakota's capitol city honors the thousands of Civil War veterans who came to Dakota Territory after the war.

(gentle music) Some came for the land.

- It was a perfect opportunity for the government to say, "Okay, well, we've already divided out this land in Dakota Territory, so let's give this as payment to our soldiers."

- [Narrator] Others joined the Black Hills gold rush of the 1870s.

There were businessmen, lawyers, and journalists.

Some were doctors with experience in battlefield surgery.

- Jail Phillip's real impact on Sioux falls is he's the beginning.

He's the first doctor.

- [Narrator] There were political appointees dispatched to the territory to establish the institutions of government and enforce the rule of law.

Civil War General William Henry Harrison Beadle set the foundation for the territory's educational system.

- He was so capable in terms of writing legislation that when he wrote the school land's provision, it was lifted, plagiarized, by five or six other states, used the same language.

- [Narrator] Private Arthur C. Mellette served with the 9th Indiana infantry during the war.

Mellette went on to become South Dakota's first governor, but the majority of Civil War veterans who came to South Dakota lived quietly.

- I think they came out here to literally rebuild their lives and often to rebuild their lives in solitude.

- [Narrator] Some veterans perhaps never fully escaped what they'd seen and done during the war.

- They were far more likely to have been wounded than the majority of union veterans, and they were far more likely to have experienced combat trauma than the majority of union veterans, and by far more likely, we're talking about a factor of three.

(solemn music) - [Narrator] Members of the South Dakota's Grand Army of the Republic posts took care of one another.

They fought to get a state-supported old soldiers home built in Hot Springs, and in 1889, they succeeded.

The medical and residential facility now known as the Michael J. Fitzmaurice State Veterans Home has been serving state veterans and their families ever since.

- So we owe it to those veterans, after the Civil War, that had the foresight to think that there needed to be care for veterans for long term, and we've been here for over 130 years, caring for veterans and their families.

- [Narrator] Some of the stories of South Dakota's Civil War veterans are inspiring, some are tragic, and some offer hope that the wounds of war can and do heal.

Their stories are worth remembering and not yet lost.

- All it takes is some time to go look, and just walk through a cemetery, and you see a name, see a stone that strikes your interest.

Go find it.

It's out there.

You can find it.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Much is known about some Civil War veterans because they wrote about their wartime experiences.

In 1888, Union Colonel Melvin Grigsby published a wartime memoir he titled "The Smoked Yank."

- Melvin Grigsby, born in Wisconsin about 1847.

He enlists in 1864 in the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry.

He's underage, noticeably.

He gets his parents' permission to serve anyway.

- [Narrator] Grigsby's unit was sent south through St. Louis into Tennessee, and eventually to Mississippi in the vicinity of Vicksburg.

He was captured by Confederate guerrillas in a minor skirmish near the Big Black River.

- And sent to Andersonville Prison in Central Georgia, and there's tens of thousands of men in a small enclosure.

- [Narrator] Grigsby writes at length about the inhumane and indeed horrifying conditions he endured at Andersonville.

He describes himself and many of his fellow prisoners as gaunt, little more than skeletons made black and blue by scurvy.

They have the look of men left for too long in a smokehouse.

Grigsby was imprisoned at Andersonville for five months.

- Melvin gets transferred to another prison at Florence, Georgia, and he manages to escape, make his way through Union lines.

This is at the time that Sherman's army is marching to the sea, marching from Atlanta to Savannah.

Melvin makes his escape and returns to Union lines.

Melvin gets out of the army, returns to Wisconsin, reads law, gets his law degree, comes to Dakota in 1876 or so, and goes into law practice with Richard Franklin Pettigrew here in Sioux Falls.

Active businessman.

He's in banking.

He's in real estate.

He practices law.

I think he's an alderman of Sioux Falls at one point in the '90s.

He eventually becomes the Attorney General of South Dakota at 1896, '98.

He's the attorney general, and when the Spanish-American War breaks out in 1898, he gets commissioned as the colonel of the to-be-created 3rd United States Volunteer Cavalry, which was known as Grigsby's Cowboys, and they included Seth Bullock, who was one of the captains, and so colorful characters from all over Dakota joined the Grigsby's Cowboys.

- [Narrator] But Grigsby's Cowboys were never called up.

They were mustered out in 1899 and Grigsby returned to Sioux Falls.

He carried on his law practice, and at the time of his death, was organizing the Sioux Falls Stockyards Bank.

Grigsby died in 1917, and is buried in Sioux Falls' Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Other veterans wrote only a little about their Civil War Service, but achieved so much in their post-war lives that they attracted the attention of historians and biographers.

Case in point, General William Henry Harrison Beadle.

- Well, Beadle was born in 1838 in Indiana in Parke County, and he's raised on a farm there.

In his autobiography, he mentions a beloved teacher in his early years of school when he would walk a great distance to school, and that teacher was educated by the Quakers in the community.

Doesn't seem that she was Quaker herself, but she was educated in a town only about 10 miles away that had a small academy to try and produce teachers for the rural areas as this area was being settled, and so he was influenced very early on.

- [Narrator] Beadle left Indiana after being accepted to the University of Michigan.

He graduated, and like so many other young men, he felt called to military service.

- And then he joined the Indiana volunteers, and in the Indiana volunteers, he may have been at Shiloh.

We know that he was involved in the campaign in West Tennessee, and definitely involved in the siege at Carthage.

He takes ill several times, almost dies the second time, but he was recovered enough by the time the Siege of Carthage happens that he saw that most of his regiment was sick.

Very few of them were able to take up arms, and he got up and went to battle and led his men who had no officers nearby.

The officers were elsewhere.

So, there's a sort of gallant story of him buckling on his cartridges and taking up his rifle, though he was still on bedrest, and leading his men in the Siege of Carthage to great effect.

- [Narrator] The Army sent Beadle back to Michigan as a recruiter.

The assignment didn't last long.

- He pivots rather quickly from that to an assignment with the Michigan Sharpshooters.

The Sharpshooters are assigned almost all over the place, so it gets really fuzzy at that point exactly where he was, because we have record of where the Sharpshooters were, but they're split out into many groups because, of course, you might want a few Sharpshooters attached to any other regiments and so on, so it's not perfectly clear at that point what other engagements he was involved in there.

- [Narrator] Beadle suffers numerous illnesses, any one of which would have allowed him to muster out, but he kept going.

He moved to Washington D.C. to join up with a so-called veterans regiment, soldiers deemed invalid but still able to contribute.

- He's mostly involved with making resupply lines function properly and making sure the supplies are where they need to be in the defense of D.C, which is, you know, relatively light compared to what's going on deeper in the south, and it's during that time as well he's asked to escort President Lincoln once or twice, just as he went about his business in D.C, but they didn't want him unaccompanied.

So, General Beadle was able to have brief conversations with the president.

- [Narrator] In 1865, Beadle was placed in command of the United States capitol military guard for Lincoln's second inauguration.

- Beadle was invited to the dais.

So, he was seated, or perhaps standing, not far.

He describes it as very close to the president, and that was a very cherished memory for him to be so close to the president at that time, whom he held in great respect.

- [Narrator] After mustering out of the Army, General Beadle returned to the University of Michigan and earned a law degree.

He started practicing law in Indiana in 1867, but then, in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him surveyor general of Dakota Territory.

In 1876, Beadle was appointed secretary of a commission tasked with revising the territory's codes.

According to historian Doane Robinson, Beadle wrote nearly all the codes of Dakota, most notably those related to public schools.

- And what he did that was so remarkable was that, in every township that's described, six sections by six sections, he made sure that there was always land that was designated specifically for school use, and that wasn't completely unusual, that had been done, but then he attached provisions saying it couldn't be sold for less than a certain amount, which was closer to a market value kind of assessment.

Now, that was unheard of at the time, and so, he was trying to prevent the school lands being sold for the pennies on the dollar that people were buying other lands for, so the railroads in particular, of course, were buying up.

So he protected those areas that were specifically to generate revenue for schools, because, of course, they could be leased by the school districts and so on, and they could be sold for the right price, but that revenue was then supposed to go into the school coffins.

- [Narrator] Surrounding states copied Beadle's legislation almost word for word.

- And so, our fledgling school system in the Dakotas, in Montana, in Wyoming, and other states was protected very well by these provisions and allowed these fledgling schools to draw revenue that never would've been there otherwise and would've only been through the unpopular means of increasing taxation.

- [Narrator] In 1889, Beadle was named president of the Madison State Normal School, today's Dakota State University.

He held that job until 1906.

He stayed on as a professor of history until his retirement in 1912.

Beadle died in 1915 and is buried in Michigan.

Recent scholarship of Beadle's writings has uncovered a lesser-known chapter in his life.

Based on some of his writings and statements made after the war, it is quite likely that Beadle worked with the underground railroad during his time at the University of Michigan.

In an article delivered to a Michigan alumni group after the war, Beadle almost admits to being a night-riding messenger for the underground railroad.

Almost, but not quite.

- Beadle is very careful about how he describes this time and how he describes his involvement.

He uses the third person, which I think to the casual reader might suggest he's not talking about himself, that he's telling a story that was passed on to him, but he knows a great many very specific details.

Exactly where the houses were that he delivered the messages to, for example, the names of some of the Quakers along the way, the locations of their homes, as well as other stops.

So, the detail that he offers for the ride is one telling fact, but the question, of course, that arises, is why?

Why does he use the third person in his article?

- [Narrator] Blessinger thinks there are two reasons.

One, Beadle was humble to a fault.

He never said or wrote anything that might inflate his stature.

The other reason?

He wanted to forever protect the names of those involved in freeing slaves.

It was a federal crime punishable by loss of property and imprisonment.

- A great many other people who had helped had probably asked him never to tell, and I think he wanted to honor that promise as well.

- [Narrator] Political prominence seems to have been inevitable for some veterans.

Major Robert Dollard was born in Massachusetts, enlisted in 1861, and was involved in multiple engagements before suffering a head wound at a battle in Virginia in 1864.

He recovered and stayed in the army until 1866.

Dollard is another among the handful to publish a book about his experiences.

- Who settles in Scotland, South Dakota, ultimately, and he's one of the very few veterans who wrote about, why I came here, what the war did to me, and it's one paragraph in a very long memoir.

He uses two metaphors I think are really interesting.

He describes going home to Massachusetts after the war as being akin to being in one of the rings of Dante's Inferno, and then he also describes himself as a fish out of water, and feels like he needs to come west to Dakota Territory to figure out who he is and what his life is going to look like.

- [Narrator] He earned a law degree before he did.

He came to Dakota in 1879.

He started farming but gave it up to practice law and get into politics.

In 1885, he was named attorney general for the territory.

He attended South Dakota's constitutional conventions, and in 1890, he was elected as South Dakota's first attorney general.

(gentle music) Another Civil War veteran who played an important role in founding South Dakota was Arthur C. Mellette.

He was born on a farm in Henry County, Indiana in 1842.

He graduated from the University of Indiana in 1863.

In 1864, he enlisted with the 9th Indiana Volunteer Regiment as a substitute for his invalid brother.

After the war ended, Mellette published his wartime diary.

He describes the hardships of army life and the many maladies that afflicted him while he served.

He was sick during most of his 11 months in the Army.

Like William Henry Harrison Beadle, Mellette returned to school after the war and earned a law degree.

He joined a partnership in Muncie, Indiana.

Mellette's wife Margaret fell ill during the 1870s and he went west, looking for a climate that might be better for her health.

He chose Dakota Territory and settled the family in Springfield.

After two years, they moved to Watertown, where Mellette had a mansion built in 1880.

He ran for territorial governor in 1885 unopposed.

After voters approved the South Dakota State Constitution in 1889, Mellette was elected as the state's first governor.

Unfortunately, Arthur Mellette ran into financial trouble.

In 1895, three years after Mellette left the governor's office, the State Treasurer William W. Taylor and several accomplices robbed the state's coffers of some $367,000, about 11.2 million in today's dollars.

As one of a handful of wealthy men responsible for bonding the state treasurer, Mellette was on the hook for $50,000.

He was forced to sell his home and liquidate most of his personal fortune.

He died in 1896 and is buried in Watertown.

His former home is now a museum.

(peaceful music) Another grand home built by a Civil War veteran still stands in Faulk County, about a hundred miles to the west of Watertown.

Construction of the home began in 1882 when Major John A. Pickler built a small claim shack on the property.

Pickler served with the 3rd Iowa Cavalry from 1862 through the war's end in 1865.

The 3rd Iowa was involved in multiple engagements from Missouri to Georgia, and Pickler rose in rank from private to major.

After mustering out, Pickler earned a law degree and married Alice Alt Pickler, a fellow student at the University of Iowa.

In 1882, Major Pickler accepted an appointment as a land agent and moved to Faulk County.

He was among the first white settlers in that part of Dakota.

He was elected to the territorial legislature in 1885 and immediately became a strong advocate for women's suffrage.

That same year, Pickler authored legislation granting women the right to vote in the territory.

The bill passed both houses of the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Gilbert Pierce.

After South Dakota achieved statehood in 1889, John Pickler went on to serve four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Alice continued to work on suffrage and temperance causes and gained a national profile in those movement.

John Pickler died in 1910.

Alice Pickler lived long enough to see ratification of the 19th Amendment, which finally granted voting rights to women nation-wide.

She passed away in 1932.

The list of Civil War veterans involved in the creation and settlement of Dakota Territory is long.

Most came after the war, but some were already in the region well before the Territory was even organized, including John Blair Smith Todd.

- John Blair Smith Todd.

He is President Lincoln's wife's cousin, and Lincoln and Mary didn't necessarily have a lot of really close family, but Todd was a close family member of theirs, and, in fact, he had gotten quite high in rank before the Civil War.

- [Narrator] J.B.S.

Todd was a West Point graduate who fought in the Second Seminole War in Florida and then in the Mexican-American war.

In 1855, he was part of an expedition led by Colonel William S. Harney against the Sioux in Nebraska.

Some sources indicate that Todd was involved in the Battle of Blue Water in Nebraska, otherwise known as the Harney Massacre.

Todd resigned his commission in 1856 and established himself as a licensed military trader at Fort Randall along the Missouri River.

He began to study law.

He also entered into a partnership with a fur trader named Daniel Frost, and together, they established posts at Bon Homme, Yankton, and Vermillion.

In 1858, Todd played a key role in negotiating a Treaty with the Yankton Sioux, a treaty that would see most of the Yankton's land handed over to Washington.

In return for about 400,000 acres of land and assurances that they would be allowed to live in peace, the Yankton turned over a significant chunk of what is today Eastern South Dakota.

In 1861, J.B.S.

Todd was admitted to the bar and elected to represent Dakota Territory in the U.S. Congress.

That same year, he rejoined the U.S. Army as an appointed General of Volunteers.

His appointment ended in 1862.

- He's not really someone who made a name for himself during the Civil War.

He stepped in.

He helped out.

He didn't help out very long.

He was only in for about eight months, and had been given the title of Brigadier General of a volunteer regiment from Missouri, and so he served, but his draw was really, you know, the great Dakota Territory, to create Dakota Territory.

It was his baby, and he really wanted to be the first governor of the Dakota Territory.

- [Narrator] John Blair Smith Todd's story would have been remarkable even without what he experienced in Washington D.C. on the evening of April 14th, 1865.

A cane that once belonged to Todd and now belongs to a Yankton museum was with him on that fateful night.

- The artifact that we have at the Mead Cultural Education Center is a cane that was given to J.B.S.

Todd one month before Ford's Theater and Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and he was in Ford's Theater the night of the assassination, next door, and, in fact, there's a long drawn-out account of his being there for Mary, consoling her, being in the room several times in and out and things like that.

So he had that cane with him the night of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

- [Narrator] J.B.S.

Todd returned to Dakota and remained active in politics and business.

He died in 1872 and is buried in the Yankton Cemetery.

The grave of the only Civil War Medal of Honor recipient to settle in South Dakota after the war is only a few steps away.

- So, as we did research about John Lanning, it turns out that he was initially part of the 1st New York volunteers and artillery in the Civil War.

So, he had enlisted very early on in July 1861.

Well, then he had gone, and at the Battle of Antietam, he was wounded and they sent him to recover, and then after he had recovered, they said, "You're going home.

You're just not really what we can use for artillery anymore."

He wanted to go back to his regiment, but they would not let him.

They said, "Nope, you need to just go home.

We're discharging you."

So he went home.

- [Narrator] But Lanning couldn't stay out of the war.

He tried to get back into the army.

They wouldn't take him, so he changed his name to Lann and joined the Navy as a landsman, the lowest paid rank at the time.

- That's where he had gotten his Medal of Honor.

It was support of land battle, and Howitzer, and he was doing a lot of recovering wounded soldiers and getting them out of the line of fire and things like that.

So he received the Medal of Honor, and what's interesting is that the Medal of Honor is actually in his assumed or his alternative name of John Lann, and, in fact, at the cemetery, his marker is John Lanning, but his veteran's marker is John Lann.

- [Narrator] The cane that Lann used to support himself in his later years is also in the collection of the Mead Cultural Education Center, along with several other artifacts that once belonged to Yankton's Civil War veterans, including the uniform of a colonel originally from Iowa named Charles Gurney.

- His enlistment date was on June 8th, 1861, so he was there really early on, and he got to be in some of the biggest actions.

He was part of Sherman's march to the sea.

So, he's not recorded as having any wounds or anything like that from almost four years of service.

- [Narrator] Charles Gurney owned a seed and nursery company in Iowa before the war and went back to running it afterward.

- And then, in the 1890s, he sent his son, D.B.

Gurney, to Yankton, because he thought, "I think we could really make some good business profits in Dakota Territory."

At that time, sorry, it was South Dakota.

So he sent his son, D.B.

Gurney, out here, and he made the business huge, and then Charles retired to South Dakota, to Yankton.

- [Narrator] D.B.

Gurney was the father of Chan Gurney, who represented South Dakota in the U.S. Senate from 1939 until 1951.

Father and son also established radio station WNAX in Yankton, which remains in operation to this day.

Gurney's seed and nursery is no longer in Yankton, but a new nursery run by a sixth generation of the Gurney family carries on the tradition.

Other artifacts in the museum include a drum carried by Norman Rapalee.

He was a 14-year-old boy when he enlisted with the 84th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.

Rapalee came to Dakota to homestead in Bon Homme County near Springfield.

He ended up owning a stone cutting and monument company.

There's the portrait and canteen of Reverend Joseph Ward, an enlistee with the 10th Rhode Island Volunteer Regiment.

He caught a fever, recovered, went into the ministry, and served as a chaplain.

- The only other thing they really talk about with Reverend Ward's Civil War time is that he had invented a mobile coffee cart.

- [Narrator] After coming to Yankton, Ward started the Congregational Church, established a high school separate from the Episcopal Church high school in town at the time.

In 1881, he founded Yankton College.

The college was closed in 1984, and the campus now serves as a federal prison camp.

But by far, most of the Civil War veterans who came to South Dakota left scant evidence of who they were and what they'd experienced.

Historical research done only in the past couple of decades points to several reasons for the rarity of Civil War veterans who said very much about that period of their lives.

- So, the profile, we know that these veterans had been mobile their entire lives, more so than the general United States population.

More so even than union veterans in general.

They moved a lot before the war, far more frequently than their peers.

They moved a lot more after the war.

So they came home.

Home wasn't working for them.

They often left pretty quickly for another location, and then, only then did they wind up in Dakota Territory.

So that's one of the things we know.

They're more mobile.

The other thing we know is that they were far more likely to have been wounded than the majority of union veterans, and they were far more likely to have experienced combat trauma than the majority of union veterans, and by far more likely, we're talking about a factor of three.

So about a little over 8% of Union Army veterans in general experienced high-intensity trauma in combat.

In Dakota Territory, that's almost 22% of the veterans who came out here.

- [Narrator] Statisticians compiling data right after the war came up with a way to identify soldiers who had experienced the most and the worst combat of the war.

They created a set of 300 regiments whose soldiers fit their criteria.

The data presented historians with an opportunity, but also a problem.

- The language of trauma does not exist in the medical vernacular at the time.

So you can't go look at medical records and say, "Oh, this person had what we think of as PTSD," or something else.

The language just literally doesn't exist, but when we use these 300 fighting regiments as a marker for exposure to high-intensity combat, that's where the Dakota Territory veterans really stand out.

- [Narrator] Because a high percentage of soldiers who served in the 300 regiments came to South Dakota compared to other states, but the intensity of their experiences isn't the only measure.

- One of the other characteristics of the veterans who came to Dakota Territory was that their military service was longer than that of most veterans.

So they tended to serve three-plus years, and they're coming out of an environment where they have been participating in organized acts of violence.

Right, they have killed people.

They have burned cities.

They've burned crops.

They've done all kinds of things.

Men in camps.

These social norms in wartime that are very different, and when they come back, they have to figure out, what are the social norms again?

How do I function in society?

And it looks like it takes them time.

- [Narrator] Some veterans did indeed disappear, saying little or nothing about their wartime experience, but John W. January of Dell Rapids chose a high-profile life in service of a new cause.

- And when the Civil War breaks out, he enlists underage in the 14th Illinois Cavalry.

January was captured at a cavalry raid on Macon, Georgia in 1864, and he was imprisoned in Andersonville Prison in Georgia, and the story goes that he was malnourished and he developed gangrene in his feet.

He went to the doctor.

The doctor basically told him, "You're a dead man.

I'm not going to do anything for you.

You won't survive."

January is made of pretty stern stuff.

He used his pocket knife to amputate both of his gangrenous feet and survived.

When he was released, he weighed 45 pounds, and he was taken to Davids Island, New York in New York Harbor, a hospital there to recover.

He spent seven months there recovering from his wounds.

The guy is pretty tough.

He makes his way in life.

In 1889, he homesteaded near Dell Rapids in Minnehaha County, Dakota Territory.

He made his living as a farmer, and in the winters, he did Chautauqua lectures to tell people about his experiences during the Civil War.

- [Narrator] January's goal in sharing his story was to raise awareness about the problems of disabled and other veterans in need of support.

John January died on 1907 and is buried in Dell Rapids.

Some veterans found support among their comrades.

They homesteaded or bought land in close proximity to one another, creating what amounted to Civil War veteran colonies.

- So, veterans colonies are a really unique thing that happens on the Northern Plains.

There are about 10 of them, and these are communities that are created by veterans for veterans from scratch.

Gettysburg, which is founded in 1883, is one of these colonies, and like these colonies, the residents of Gettysburg have extraordinarily high exposure to combat trauma.

In fact, the residents of these soldier colonies have a higher exposure to combat trauma than the soldiers in general, who are coming out here, and those soldiers already had an extraordinarily high exposure to combat trauma.

So, in these colonies, we see about a third of the veterans who settle there have fought in things like the fighting 300 regiments.

- [Narrator] Union County in far Southeastern South Dakota also had a higher than average concentration of Civil War veterans.

The county had a different name when the territory was formed, but county residents got its name changed to Union in order to show their solidarity with the Union cause.

- There was quite an influx from '66 to 1870, and you have to understand what happened in the Civil War to get a grip on it, but regiments were raised by county or township or city, and then they would go into battle, and if they had a particular horrible run, for instance, say Potter County, Pennsylvania, or Dunkirk, New York, one of those two, they might lose two-thirds of their adult males for that county, so when people came back, there was nothing left, and there was hard feelings, and a lot of people wanted to escape.

I mean, everybody was running from their ghosts like any war, to a certain extent, and they came eastern.

Of course, the Homestead Act had been implemented in '62, and that allowed them to start a new life somewhere else, and I think that's what generated it most.

- [Narrator] For a time, the migration of Civil War veterans to Dakota was mainly about land.

As long as they'd fought on the union side and not for the confederacy, they could get a break on some provisions of the Homestead Act or take advantage of other kinds of land patents set up just for them.

- It was a perfect opportunity for the government to say, "Okay, well, we've already divided out this land in Dakota Territory, so let's give this as payment to our soldiers."

And a lot of soldiers, it was a really nice idea just to start over somewhere.

Just to leave.

Not have to deal with reconstruction after the war.

Leave it all behind and go west.

- [Narrator] The story in the Black Hills was altogether different.

There's no way of knowing exactly how many Civil War veterans came to the hills looking for gold in 1876 and later, but the number is substantial.

In the South Lead Cemetery, in the shadow of the Homestake Mine, lies a Civil War veteran with a story unlike that of any other Dakota Settler.

- He's one of Lead's early, early settlers.

His name was Ambrose Lester and he was an African American resident.

I do know quite a bit about him, because every once in a while, the newspaper would interview him and ask him a few questions, and he was very popular about town, but he was born in Kentucky.

We don't know what year he was born, because even according to the newspaper, it appeared that he didn't know when he was born.

According to his own information, when he was seven years old, he was put on the auction block and sold from his parents, who were both slaves.

He said that the first time he was sold, he went for $500.

Then, when he was 19, he was sold again, and went for $1,000, and at some unspecified date later, he was sold for a third and final time for $1,500.

About that time, the Civil War broke out, and his current master took him with him and enlisted in the rebel army, and so I don't know how common that was for slaves to go with their masters into the service, but he did, and in 1863, he was captured and then released.

So, he gained his freedom, and that was when he decided to come west.

- [Narrator] Later in his life, the people of Lead and Deadwood tried to do a bit more to help him out.

- They went to the work of getting his military records and everything they could gather about him because they planned to send him to the soldiers' home in Hot Springs.

Before they could actually do that, he passed away on April 17th, 1906, and so he ended up just being buried here in South Lead Cemetery.

- [Narrator] In what seems like an odd coincidence, there are two Confederate veterans buried only a few feet away from Ambrose Spencer.

Their graves are unmarked but their identities are known.

William Lafayette Frisbie and Henry Lawson Muse.

Muse was the grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran and the son of a veteran of the war of 1812.

Census information from Pittsylvania County, Virginia before the war reveal that Muse was a slave owner with a lot of land and a big bank account.

After the war, most of his land was gone, as was his fortune, which may be why he chose to come to Dakota.

He founded a mining company and established himself in the area.

There is certainly more to know about him.

Historians can learn a lot about South Dakota's Civil War veterans because of this, a special census conducted in 1885 that contains a section meant to record the names, locations, and service records of Civil War veterans in the state.

It was the only census of its kind in the nation.

- And there's a lot of information you can find in these records.

The name is obvious, but it also includes, like, what company they served with, how long, when they joined the Union army, when they left, what their rank was when they came in and when they left.

The most important part within this document is that it explains when somebody officially came to Dakota Territory, down to the very month.

So, if you have a Civil War ancestor who was in Dakota Territory at this time, you can get a lot of information about them, and it also includes a number of remarks, if they were wounded, if they were a prisoner.

Different information like that.

So, these census materials provide little nuggets of history that you can do a little more research and a little more digging.

- [Narrator] The census recorded that there were about 6,000 Union veterans living in Southern Dakota Territory in 1885.

There was a separate census schedule for the few Confederate veterans in the territory.

- By my count in the census, there are 69 of them.

That's a unique group that needs a little bit more work done on them.

They're very quiet after the war.

When you see Union Army veteran organizations like The Grand Army of the Republic created in 1883 and 1884 in this part of the country, and you read their initial annual addresses by their local commanders, Confederates are still referred to in the 1880s as traitors.

That's a very prominent part of the public discourse, and so those Confederate veterans are very quiet.

They're not advertising that they're here, but 69 of them do record themselves on that census, which is fascinating.

- [Narrator] Those who were already in the army and already in Dakota when the war broke out are also included in the census.

- So, Fort Randall and the forts that were along the Missouri River were regular US army posts that were established before the Civil War, and when the Civil War came, what happens at Fort Randall and the other forts mirrors exactly what happens in the rest of the US Army.

About a quarter of the officer corps who are at Fort Randall declare for the Confederacy and leave, and that is right in line with the percentage of United States Army officers who left for the Confederacy all across the US Army.

So they leave.

It's an interesting phenomenon.

What happens at Fort Randall and at other places too is that there are often fond farewells as friends leave to fight on opposite sides of the war, which is a really interesting phenomena that is unique, really, to civil wars.

- [Narrator] South Dakota's other Civil War veterans include those who joined the 1st Dakota Cavalry, a militia meant for home defense.

- The militia's got strengths and weaknesses.

The regulars are small.

So, under the militia laws, they provided for another class of soldiers called volunteers, and in a time of emergency, the president and Congress could call volunteers into service to serve for a specific number of volunteers to serve a specific time period for a specific purpose.

Volunteers were raised by the states, the officers commissioned by the governors of the state, and then they were sworn into federal service.

So, they're kind of a hybrid of the militia and the regulars.

In Dakota, those state and territorial responsibilities were based upon the population, and so, in early 1862, Dakota raises the first of two companies of cavalry.

- [Narrator] When the Sioux Uprising flared up in Minnesota in 1862 and began to reach Dakota, the Cavalry helped moved settlers from places like Sioux Falls to forts in Yankton and Elk Point.

Once things had settled down, the 1st Dakota took on a new mission.

It took the army a little while to get organized in Dakota.

They start in 1863, and there's columns led by Henry Hastings Sibley from Minnesota and Alfred Sully up the Missouri River, and they're trying to catch people in a pincer, and really some very insignificant engagements that really resulted in the Sioux completely eluding the army and crossing the Missouri River, where they weren't really supposed to go, and there's a campaign in '64 and '65.

Some of those get to be pretty large and the Dakota cavalrymen are part of those campaigns.

- [Narrator] A year after the war ended in the east, Union veterans began organizing chapters of what they would call the Grand Army of the Republic or GAR.

It was a fraternal organization a bit like the Freemasons or Odd Fellows in terms of their dedication to civic duty, but unique in their dedication to supporting their former comrades in arms and their families.

- I tell the story about George Johnson, Redfield veteran, member of the GAR there.

He wanted to go to the national encampment in Minneapolis that year.

I think it was 1884 or 1886.

They raise enough money.

Johnson gets there.

He happens to have an accident.

Somehow, his leg gets crushed under a trolley car or a street car, and the leg has to be amputated.

The other members of the GAR, the South Dakota delegation, came home.

They raised enough money, over about $3,000, not only to pay all the hospital expenses and the expenses for the amputation, but whatever money was left over to give to his wife for procurement of, you know, putting food on the table for the next however long that money lasted.

- [Narrator] The GAR was also a massively influential voting bloc in their time.

One of the great legacies of the of the GAR in South Dakota was the establishment of an old soldiers' home.

- It was one of their major accomplishments, and that had been a goal, I think, of the South Dakota delegation of the GAR from the very beginning.

As soon as the South Dakota GAR is founded in 1883, these boys are talking about, we need a soldier's home here, and, of course, they had to fight with some democratic territorial governors who saw it the other way and said, "These veterans should go back to their home state if they want to enter a soldier's home, and if they need help for their disabilities."

And these South Dakota boys said, "No, we want one right here in our own state."

- [Narrator] It took several years during the 1880s for their political clout to finally loosen the purse-strings of state government, but they succeeded.

The South Dakota Old Soldiers' Home was constructed in 1889 and welcomed its first resident in 1890.

The first building constructed is still in use.

A newer building dedicated in 2016 continues to serve today's veterans as the Michael J. Fitzmaurice State Veterans' Home.

- So we owe it to those veterans after the Civil War that had the foresight to think that there needed to be care for veterans for long term, and we've been here for over 130 years, caring for veterans and their families.

- [Narrator] There are Civil War veterans interred in cemeteries all over South Dakota.

Some of the headstones are fading, but they can still be a reminder of what was sacrificed to get America through its time of greatest division.

(gentle music) In 1918, the remaining members of the Grand Army of the Republic and many grateful South Dakotans put up a monument to the Civil War veterans who came to call the state home.

It faces the State Capitol building and looks across the lake to newer memorials of the wars and the South Dakotans who heeded a call to service.

Their stories are South Dakota's stories.

- Then there's another gentleman by the name of James Griffin Conroy, and that's a pretty amazing story.

It wasn't about battle, because he ended up being, he was a surgeon.

He was probably our highest-ranking veteran out there as well.

He was a major, eventually became a major, but he moved to Wisconsin a few years before the war started, and he was from New York, and he taught school in Wisconsin, and then he decided, "I'm going to med school."

So, he went to Rush Medical School, and at that time, medical school was 18 months, maybe something like that.

You didn't even have to have an undergrad degree.

You just went to med.

He paid $89 for his medical degree, and instantly he joins the 3rd Wisconsin and he goes to war, and the first year probably wasn't so bad, because that was in '62.

I think he might have been in Antietam.

I'm not sure that would have been, but things really changed in '63.

He was a chancellor in Gettysburg.

In Gettysburg, the family tells that he worked three days straight until he passed out from exhaustion and had to be hospitalized himself for a period of time.

Then he went on with Sherman to the march to the sea, and who knows what else, but he was promoted to major.

Well, eventually, he comes here, and he dedicates his life to helping people here.

You know, a physician at that time was unlike a physician today.

You made a living, but you didn't get the home in Palm Springs.

It wasn't that kind of money, but he did that, and, ultimately, he passed way early in the 1900s.

There had been some kind of epidemic of flu or whatever coming through and, day and night, for two weeks, he was out, and it was like in March, so the weather wasn't great either, and going from house to house, and he eventually came down with the same thing he was treating, and that's what eventually took his life.

- A guy named Charlie Barrick.

An Irishman, born in County Mayo, Ireland, in the 1840s, immigrated to the United States, served in the Illinois volunteers, the 46th Illinois, I believe, and was wounded at Shiloh.

He came to Dakota, lived in Sioux Falls, not particularly...

He wasn't a city council member.

He wasn't mayor.

He wasn't a big business man, but there's a great story about him.

Just an interesting character.

The election day in 1889, when Benjamin Harrison will get elected as president, Charlie Barrick was celebrating with a few other people down apparently on Main Avenue, and they were in a bar, and, you know, you occasionally get hungry after you've been imbibing a little bit.

Charlie went out the door of the bar, aimed for a restaurant, and ended up in Mr. Booth's undertaking.

Booth said, "You look a little pekid, Charlie.

How about you lay down here?"

Charlie laid down, went to sleep.

He woke up and he was laying in a coffin in the backroom, and Mr. Booth's trying to calm him down because Charlie's going a little crazy, and Charlie jumped out the window, out of the back alley, and is running down the street, saying, "Booth's trying to bury me alive!"

- So, John Jolly is quite typical of the sort of veteran who settled in Dakota Territory.

He was born in Canada.

As a young man in Canada, he moves around to a couple of locations.

He becomes a tanner's apprentice, and then John Jolly moves to Portage, Wisconsin when he's 16 years old.

All right, so he's moved twice by the time he's 16.

When the war breaks out, John Jolly joins the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry, and he sees significant combat over the course of the war.

The census records that John Jolly participated in 12 major engagements during the war and that he was wounded.

So, after the war, John Jolly went back to Portage, Wisconsin, and very quickly found that Portage was not an appealing place for him at all, and so he went to Chicago, determined to remake himself a little bit there.

Enrolled in what was called a commercial college in Chicago.

Only lasted a couple of months there before decided that Chicago wasn't the place for him either, and I think in 1867, John Jolly made the trip west and settled in Clay County, in Vermillion, and created a whole new life for himself here.

- Fred Donaldson.

Yeah, a lot of people will know Fred.

So, Fred Donaldson, he's famous in Yankton.

I don't know if he's famous all over South Dakota, but, boy, is he a flamboyant individual!

And a young, young entrepreneur.

A very interesting gentleman.

He first served, he only served one year at the Civil War.

He served in the 52nd Wisconsin, and he enlisted at age 16, so he was a young boy, and after the war, he had come out to Dakota Territory.

Again, he had a land grant and came out here.

He had his fingers in so many things.

The river boat industry, the ferry industry.

He was part of that.

When he first got out here, and that's what we have in the collection here at the Mead Cultural Education Center, is a star that is kind of a home-made star, and it's engraved "FD".

He was a nightwatchman for the government warehouse here in Yankton, so the river boats and train would come to Yankton, offload at the warehouse, and he was the nightwatchman.

He was also the nightwatchman for the Bramble and Miner store, and Bramble and Miner, Miner County, same guy, they were very early big-time, very influential businessmen, and so he really aligned himself with just the right people.

He started a brickyard.

There's a lot of homes in Yankton County, in Southeast South Dakota, that are made from his brickyard.

He had also started I guess I would call it the first Walmart of Dakota Territory, because he had a business that he had built, and it's on the corner of Pine and 3rd Street.

A lot of people know it today as the Black Steer Restaurant, and that building, he had a meat market, he had dried goods.

If you needed it, he had it.

That was his thing.

(peaceful music)