Posted on 11/01/2001 11:01:58 AM PST by Willie Green
Edited on 05/07/2004 7:12:06 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
PIERRE, S.D. -- It's hard to believe that Andy Krause wasn't planted by the South Dakota tourism department.
Krause, from Brighton, came to hunt at Cheyenne Ridge Lodge, built a few miles north of the state's capital by nationally known walleye pro Mike McClelland. If the South Dakota tourism people were smart, they would just put a camera on Krause after a day of hunting and turn him loose.
(Excerpt) Read more at freep.com ...
When governor sends invitation, hunters can't wait to reach limit
November 1, 2001
BY ERIC SHARP FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
PIERRE, S.D. -- Bill Janklow still thinks fondly of the judge who 45 years ago suggested that he might prefer serving in the military to serving time in the county jail.
"I was a city kid, and I hated living in a little town in South Dakota," said Janklow, the four-term governor of one of America's least-populous states. "I was always in trouble. I got brought up before a local judge one day and he said, 'Janklow, this town doesn't like you, and you don't like this town.' He suggested I'd probably be better off going into the service than going to jail."
Born in Chicago, Janklow spent some of his early years in Germany, where his dad was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. But his father died young, and his 35-year-old widowed mother retreated with five small children to her family home in Flanders, S.D.
"I was just smart enough to realize that the judge was right," Janklow said. "So I enlisted in the Marines in 1956. I was almost 17.
"I was discharged three years later, and I got a big surprise when I got back to Flanders. I liked the place, and because I was an honorably discharged Marine, they liked me. While I was gone, the town found new punks to hate."
Wearing a fleece pullover and well-worn blue jeans, Janklow reminisced in the Ramkota Hotel banquet room, where several hundred people enjoyed a state-funded dinner on the eve of the 21st annual governor's pheasant hunt. The hunt, which Janklow started after he was elected to his first term as governor in 1980, is a celebration of South Dakota's fabulous outdoors resources.
"I don't have world-class restaurants here," Janklow said. "I can't take you to Disneyland. I can't show you Mackinac Island. But I can give you an outdoor experience that you won't find in many other places in this country.
"You can catch our fish. You can eat them. Our air is clean to breathe. When our kids go out at night on Halloween, the parents don't have to worry about anyone hurting them.
"I do the buffalo roundup in September for the people who don't hunt, and this event in October for people who do. We invite business people we're trying to interest in investing in South Dakota, a few writers, and people I want to recognize for their contributions to the state."
One of the latter is Jim Lampey of Rapid City, near the Black Hills in the western part of the state. He moved his concrete block equipment firm to South Dakota from Minnesota a year ago.
"They used this hunt to convince me to come here," Lampey said. "Since I love to hunt, I was easy to convince. The irony is that my family used to live here, but was forced out by hard times during the Depression."
South Dakota is one of the country's agricultural cornucopias, pouring out enough corn, wheat, beans and other produce to feed not just Americans but people around the world. But its population is tiny, at 720,000 only about one-sixth as large as metro Detroit.
Agriculture has also changed dramatically in the last three decades. Because there is an economy of scale, more land is being worked by fewer farmers using much bigger machines, and the result has been a decrease in the number of people employed in agriculture. That has made the state's second-biggest business, tourism, more important, especially to the growing number of South Dakotans who are moving into towns and cities.
Hunting the millions of pheasants that live on the farmlands has become an $80-million-a-year business. It has been an economic godsend for farmers who have had trouble making a living during decades of drought and wildly fluctuating commodity prices.
Among those farmers is Cody Warne. Ten years ago, he convinced his father to allow him to take 2,000 of the family's 8,000-acre farm near Onida out of crop production. Warne begin managing it intensively for pheasants, prairie grouse, waterfowl and other game.
"It's worked out pretty well, especially the last few years," said Warne, whose farm hosted an 11-man team that was one of 30 sent to various farms for the governor's hunt.
As Warne led a caravan of pickup trucks and SUV's to the cornfield where the hunt began, pheasants scattered ahead of the vehicles like pigeons in a city park.
Four hunters were placed at one end of the corn rows to act as blockers, and the other seven began a slow walk up from the other end. In the next 20 minutes, dozens of pheasants erupted from the corn, and the hunters killed 18 roosters, a little more than half of their allowed bag limit of three per gun.
A quarter-mile away, thousands of ducks, snow geese, speckled geese, white-fronted geese and Canada geese sat on a small lake, and the grasslands around the lake were laced with dozens of trails and beds left by whitetail and mule deer.
"We sat out there on the lakeshore the other day and took 16 geese as they came off the lake to go inland," Warne said. "Then we went out and shot a limit of pheasants. Pheasant numbers are down some this year, but it doesn't make much difference to us. We manage the place so that there are still so many the hunters can't tell the difference."
It took only two hours and 20 minutes for the 11 hunters to get a limit of 33 birds, and that includes 30 minutes spent driving between the fields. Jim McMahon, a Sioux Falls attorney invited for the hunt, said, "Last weekend, 12 of us hunted a place that hadn't been hunted on opening day. We killed 36 pheasants in an hour."
Promoting pheasant hunting hasn't been popular with everyone in the state. Some local residents, especially in the cities, say that commercialized hunting has kept them off the farms they traditionally hunted for free. Most farmers charge $100-$150 a day for access, and premium properties like the Warne Ranch get $1,600 for a three-day upland game-bird hunt, with many of the customers visiting during corporate outings and conventions. This season, the opening weekend of the pheasant hunt was for state residents only.
But Janklow, who became one of the most influential lawyers and judges in the state, sees the outdoors in general and hunting specifically as a means to expand South Dakota's economy in what he thinks will be increasingly difficult times.
"It's still a place where we live at harmony and peace with the outdoors," he said. "But I have to admit it's changing. Frankly, I can still remember using a spotlight to get jackrabbits at night."
Warne Ranches can be reached by calling 605-264-5325.
Contact ERIC SHARP at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com.
As for Daschle - yeah - he's not a good representation of the state - he's been in Washington way to damn long - and seems to have forgotten his duties and his roots.
I can't imagine that the good people of South Dakota would re-elect him. I think up until now they had a if it ain't broke don't fix it attitude towards thier congressmen. He broke...he broke big time.
You obviously have not been to the state, and although "stalkingelk" apparently would just as soon never see you there - you should try it sometime - if you're at all into hunting and fishing, you won't find a better place.
My pleasure.
There really isn't much news posted about South Dakota...
And this was a nice, positive article that I thought the hunters would enjoy!
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