Why I Love History, part 4!

Today, SDSHS Press author Suzanne Julin, who wrote A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941, continues our little blog series on why we love history.

Why do I like history? The key is in the word “why.” I want to understand why things are the way they are or why they were the way they were. Why did people hold slaves? Why did bungalows become such a popular residential building style? Why doesn’t Los Angeles have an efficient system of public transportation? Why did we fight in Viet Nam? People who say history bores them because they hated memorizing names and dates in school were never introduced to the fascination of peeling back the layers of history, where every answer leads to another question.

The study of history cannot provide absolute and final answers to most of those questions, but it can help us understand the forces that have formed our societies and shaped our world. While writing A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism 1880-1941, I kept “why”—and its companion, “how”– in mind while I traced the development of the tourism industry in western South Dakota. In the process, I gained a much deeper understanding of tourism development in general and of the Black Hills as the place it is today. I hope I have shared that understanding with the book’s readers.

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles, part 3

Today we continue the serialization of Suzanne Julin’s new book from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941.

Fred Evans of the Hot Springs Town-Site Company led much of that development. An Ohio native who had worked in railroads and banking, Evans came to the Black Hills during the gold rush and established a successful freighting company. In 1886, Evans sold his business and shifted his attention to the new health resort. The original town-site company reorganized into the Dakota Hot Springs Company, with Evans as president, and built a two-story frame hotel, the largest in Hot Springs at the time. The following year, Iowa investors purchased the controlling interest in the enterprise.

By 1887, bathhouses and three hotels provided services to guests, most of whom were Black Hills residents. The community also attracted a dentist, a general store, a drugstore, and a barbershop, among other businesses. The development of the health resort with its springs, hotels, and bathhouses overshadowed the business section of the town, located to the south of the resort area on a low flat and separated from it by a narrow canyon. The two sections of Hot Springs became known as “upper town” and lower town” and the split became social, economic, and political, as well as geographical.

Between 1889 and 1893, both sections grew rapidly. Upper town catered to health-seekers; lower town provided goods to the resort industry as well as to city residents and area ranchers and farmers. In 1890, the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad extended its line to Hot Springs, and more than one hundred new businesses were established in the community during that year. The Burlington Railroad built a branch line into the city in 1891, and by the mid-1890s, Hot Springs had fifteen hotels and boarding houses. A number of new structures were built of red and pink-hued Lakota sandstone, quarried near town. The ornately carved, colored stone blended with the canyon cliffs to give the city a distinctive, sophisticated appearance. The Evans Hotel, which opened in 1892, was the most imposing of the new buildings. The five-story structure, built in an H-shape, boasted castellated trim and a wide verandah. With elevators, electric lights, and expensive interior decorations, Evans raised the quality of accommodations offered in the town to a new level.

More to come next week!

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles continued…

Yesterday, we started a short serialization of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 by Suzanne Julin. Today, the SDSHS Press continues the serialization, and we hope that these glimpses give you a fair idea of the book. If you wish to purchase a copy, either visit a local bookstore or our website.

Black Hills tourism began soon after the 1875-1876 gold rush brought permanent white settlement to the area. In 1879, several people claimed land near a group of warm-water springs in a scneic canyon at the southern end of the Hills. After one local man, Joe Larive, found relief from his rheumatism by bathing in the warm water, he and two other settlers began offering baths to the public. In 1881, five residents of Deadwood, in the northern Black Hills, formed a company to take advantage of this natural resource. Rudolphus D. Jennings, Alexander S. Stewart, Erving G. Dudley, L. R. Graves, and Fred T. Evans formed the Hot Springs Town-Site Company, dedicated to the goal of developing a health resort in the warm-water area of the southern Hills. Members of the new enterprise purchased one of the original claims and filed others, and Jennings and Stewart moved to the site.

Jennings and his wife Mattie established a crude resort facility in a four-room log cabin next to one of the springs. They boarded customers, mostly local people who traveled there by stage or on horseback. Another settler, John Kohler, built a small hotel and provided services in competition with the Jennings. In 1883, the community of Hot Springs became the county seat of the newly created Fall River County, and two years later the Fremont, Elkhorn, & Missouri Valley Railroad reached Buffalo Gap, thirteen miles to the east. The county-seat designation gave the settlement an air of permanence, and the proximity of the train terminus enabled travelers to reach Hot Springs with greater ease. This stability and accessibility initiated a burst of development of resort-related amenities.

More to come tomorrow!

Short Serialization of New Black Hills Tourism Book Begins Today

Suzanne Julin’s new book, A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 has just been released by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press.

In order to celebrate this new book, we’re going to run a short serialization over the next week or so, just to give you a taste of the book.

In 1941, as the Great Depression came to a close, the South Dakota State Highway Commission issued an advertisement that invoked the names of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and promised visitors petrified forests, gold mines, caves, and wild animals. “Cool Nights, No Mosquitos,” the ad declared, touting the climate and the ambiance of the Black Hills. For hundreds of thousands of tourists during the period between the World Wars, this region was the place where the West began. Its tourism industry was born decades earlier, however, as entrepreneurial visionaries in the Black Hills began to work to attract travelers. In the years before the end of World War I, tourism in the Black Hills was unorganized, largely unadvertised, and dependent on natural resources and nearby populations for its clientele. By the time the war ended, tourism in the Black Hills would be on the cusp of dramatic changes.

The Black Hills constitute a range of mountains in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming, covering an area about fifty miles wide and a little over one hundred miles long. The ponderosa pines common the slopes make the hills look black from a distance, and the Lakotas gave them the name Paha Sapa, “Hills that are Black.” These are the highest mountains east of the Rockies. Harney Peak, the tallest summit, reaches an elevation of 7,242 feet. Perhaps the most unusual feature of the area’s geography is its setting; surrounded by sparsely populated grasslands of the northern Great Plains, the Black Hills looks and feels like a forested oasis in an enormous, empty land. Indeed, it seems a rare and “marvelous hundred square miles” to the weary traveler.

The history of tourism development in the Black Hills through the end of World War I mirrors the growth of that industry in the United States. Early pleasure travel in the British colonies in America and in the new United States consisted mainly of health-related trips and included visits to natural hot-water spas at places like Saratoga Springs, New York, and White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. As roads improved and greater numbers of people could reach the sites, many of these locations began to provide accommodations that attratced affluent citizens who could imitate the social life in the great spas of Europe. In the 1820s, the rise of the market economy and industrial technology led to increased wealth and better transportation systems, and more people could travel to more places. Railroad expansion after the Civil War made economical travel even more widely available, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 opened up pleasure trips to the West–at least for those who could afford them. This trajectory of tourism development, with some variations, was repeated in the Black Hills of South Dakota between 1879 and 1918.

That’s it for today, but we’ll have more from A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles over the next week or so.

Suzanne Julin, author of “A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles,” writes about her publishing experience

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles by Suzanne Julin

Nearly a year ago, I signed a contract with the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, giving the Press the right to publish my manuscript on tourism development in the Black Hills before World War II. I was pleased with my decision, because I was familiar with the staff at the Press and I knew they would give the manuscript careful attention. In addition, I had been impressed with the publications of the Press during the past decade. My ultimate goal had always been a work of scholarship that would appeal to the public as well as to scholars in the fields of tourism history, western history, and South Dakota history, and I believed that this press would help me meet that goal.

My interest in Black Hills tourism began when I was eleven years old and my family took our first vacation, traveling from our home in southeastern South Dakota to the Black Hills. I had never been more than ninety miles away from my home town of Dante, and I was fascinated by the mountain setting of the Black Hills and by its tourism industry. As I grew up, I never stopped wondering about how that industry developed. When I finally had the luxury to do serious research on the topic, I discovered a unique set of circumstances that led to the development of regional tourism and a regional identity. The history of this development formed the basis of the book to be developed under my contract with the South Dakota State Historical Society Press.

With the contract came requests for specific revisions. Over the next few months, I worked on those revisions, usually with great pleasure. I am quite sure no writer has ever been satisfied with a manuscript he or she produced, and I was no exception. Revising the manuscript with the assistance of experienced editors and readers helped me make my words flow more smoothly and my conclusions carry more weight.

That was the easy part. A few months after submitting the revised manuscript I received the page proofs. I knew this was my last chance to make any substantive changes. I felt as I did when I was preparing to send my daughter off to kindergarten: I was not ready to let go, and if I could just keep delaying, perhaps the inevitable would never happen. After some diplomatic prodding from the Press, I finished the changes and they finally pried the manuscript out of my hands. Shortly, I received the final proofs and I was delighted. The design of the book—and particularly the nearly fifty historic photographs included—complemented the text well. The striking cover carried the title we had decided on after many false starts: A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941.

In mid-July, I telephoned Nancy Koupal, Director of Research and Publishing, to go over the final corrections to the manuscript. At the end of our call, I asked her about my next step in preparing for the publication. She replied, “You are done. The next time you hear from us will be when a box of your books arrives on your doorstep.”

I am eagerly awaiting that shipment.