Joe Spiller

An International Crisis In South Dakota Joe Spiller

Four months into the winter of 1954-55, weather in western South Dakota had been torturous for man, beast and machinery. It wasn't over yet. Saturday, February 19, 1955, radio stations were broadcasting warning from news and weather wire services of an impending storm, the likes of which the Black Hills had not been seen in decades. Four miles east of Sturgis, South Dakota, automotive repair shop owner, and mechanic, Rikard Carlson was thinking, hoping maybe this will be the last big blast of the season. He wasn't ready for it. Neither was his equipment. The World War II combat veteran's tolerance-meter for winter was pegged at FULL. Neither Rikard, behind the ribbed steel walls of his Quonset hut repair garage, or the US Weather Service teletype machine operators in Denver had any idea of the cyclonic hell the Canadian Witch of Winter had poured out of her cauldron. A glacier like river of snow, northwest gale force winds and arctic temperatures had careened out of Saskatchewan a day earlier and was only hours away from burying the landscape around Sturgis, South Dakota and the surrounding Black Hills in a winter grave of snow. Into this powder-house of miserable weather, intolerable equipment, lost patience and frazzled temperament, another storm arrives at the repair shop. Five visitors, four of them strangers, walked through the Quonset hut door within an hour of each other. The fifth unexpected visitor, an old war buddy from ten years earlier shows up under dire circumstances. Three of the uninvited intruders stay for the next 72 hours. Each visitor, welcome or unwelcome tests Rikard's humanity and civility. Life and death hangs in the balance as a US Marshal makes life unbearable for five people, as the storm unleashes the full force of its wrath against the Carlson home place on the South Dakota Plains.