Just north of Pierre

That's President John F. Kennedy. It's August 17, 1962, one of the few times JFK ever stepped foot in South Dakota. That day he had reason, good reason. The celebration that drew him was the dedication of the huge Oahe Dam, an earthen monster that created, upstream behind it, the fourth largest man-made reservoir in the world. 

Seven mighty turbines create electricity sufficient to power entire regions of the country. This beast stands 245 feet above river bottom and required 92 million cubic yards of fill dirt, and well over a million cubic yards of concrete. Don't even try to imagine that kind of bulk in quantity. 

Lake Oahe added 2, 250 miles of lakeshore real estate to South Dakota's otherwise paltry sum, not to mention 51 state-run recreation areas and gadzillions of salmon and lake trout. Fishermen have followed, loads of them, competitions just about every weekend. Oh, and water for farmers and ranchers, water in abundance in a region where average rainfall may wander, year to year, painfully. Lake Oahe starts right there, just a few miles north of Pierre, but spreads all the way into North Dakota, a huge, veritable wonder of the world. 

Right up there on top--you have to look to find it--is a chapel, not large, but well-kept. Take a step in--it's nicely furnished with pews and pulpit, decorated thoughtfully in proper church-ly furnishings of the time. A Congregationalist preacher named Thomas Riggs and his wife, Nina, built it, determined to start a mission among the Native people of central South Dakota--and a school, too, where students could be taught to read and write in a grammar book created by Riggs' father, Stephen, who had, already in the 1830s, undertaken mission work among the Dakota out east in Minnesota. 

Why the powers-that-be named that mammoth earthen dam after a tiny little church the lake displaced is a question I can't answer but may well reflect more than a little white privilege. The story goes that a visitor to the Cheyenne River once remarked on the fact that there seemed to be no old people around. Some wise man or woman told the visitor that most had died of a broken heart, so much of their lives and their history simply gone beneath the waters of Lake Oahe.

Anyway, you can miss the chapel with all that wide-open beauty around the dam, but don't. You can honor the whole Riggs family by stopping by and poking your head in. "Bringing in the sheaves" on South Dakota reservation land was a lot tougher work than some of the old missionary hymns had made it sound. 

And then there's this too. Promise me you'll not miss it. It's just a few miles south.

The Snake Butte Turtle Effigy is neither stunning, like the Oahe Dam, nor quaint, like Oahe chapel; and it has absolutely nothing to do with displacing water or land. It sits up top one of a hundred river bluff promontories, and, trust me, you've got to hunt to find it. It's little more than a box of rocks in a chain-link fence. 

But those rocks have a shape, a turtle shape that's here roughly visible.

Let me help.

Those are my lines, and just over the hill is the Missouri River valley. Right now you're standing on private land. No problem--the good people who own the land like to share the Snake Butte Turtle Effigy. 

Age?--who knows? Origin is just as mysterious, although historians do prefer one wonderful saga. Let's just go with it. 

Once upon a time many hundreds of years ago, an Arikara village stood somewhere close to where the dam now stands. The Arikaras were in constant danger of a Dakota attack, so they posted sentries up on promontories like Snake Butte to keep an eye open for war parties. The Dakotas were as stealthy as they were dangerous. So when that young Arikara warrior spotted the sneaky Dakotas, they were already close enough to let loose a fusillade of arrows, one of which caught the young warrior mortally. 

His wound was deep and dangerous, but his people's safety was his only concern. With every ounce of strength and perseverance, he ran and ran and ran, a half-mile, a mile?--distance doesn't matter here, bravery does. Right here, at the edge of the butte, he fell and died, leaving behind a trail of blood.

The Dakota warriors had far more respect for courage than they had for the Arikara, and what they'd witnessed in the kid's frantic determination to warn his village was a miracle of selflessness that stunned them so profoundly that after marking whatever blood spots they could in the grass the kid had traversed, they sat down and created this turtle effigy at the spot where he died, to honor him and his immense and dogged courage.

Whatever you do, don't miss the Turtle Effigy. It may well be the only memorial you'll ever find anywhere created to honor a story of the courage of an enemy. That's almost biblical.