SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - Lyle Monsees sits in a pickup atop a hill where the pasqueflowers are blooming, peering through the afternoon breeze as if it’s some sort of ancestral looking glass.
The din of 21st century South Dakota drifts his way from the blacktop in the distance. But the old man, hobbled by his eight-plus decades, doesn’t hear it.
He’s fixed on something else, something only his mind can see across this rolling landscape west of Sioux Falls that has belonged to his family for maybe 137, 138 years.
Out here, Monsees watches the ghosts of buffalo grazing in the valleys. He hears the ancient echoes of cavalry riders from the nearby Sioux Falls encampment, fueled with whiskey brought up by riverboats through Yankton and racing their horses on a makeshift track.
Mostly, he remembers the pasqueflowers.
“I learned about them from my mother when I was a little boy,” he says as he leans forward in the seat of a friend’s truck. “She could remember when the hillside was visible from our house a quarter mile away, showing up in a lavender color.”
Today, the creeping urbanization pushing toward towns such as Ellis and Tea and Harrisburg has conspired with the evolution of modern farm practices to sweep much of the color from the prairie around Sioux Falls. Plant scientists say you still can find the pasque in some state parks or other spots in South Dakota not affected by sprawl or the demands of row crops. But those places are increasingly rare, particularly in the southeastern corner of the state.
It bothers Monsees then that nobody seems to know what pasqueflowers are anymore, or “remembers that they are our state flower.” You have to wonder, he says, if schoolchildren today are even taught that in 1903, state legislators across this land of harsh, often brutal winters decreed that the pasqueflower become the first official symbol of South Dakota.
Legend has it they were entranced by this little wildflower, a member of the buttercup family, pushing its way up through the soil before all other wildflowers - “out of cold turf at the edge of the snows,” poet laureate Badger Clark wrote - and announcing with its presence the arrival of spring.
They even gave it a motto: “I lead.”
An arctic relic left behind when the glaciers receded millennia ago, the pasqueflower adapted well to cold conditions, thriving on rocky, gravelly hillsides, says Dave Graper, professor of horticulture at South Dakota State University and director of the university’s McCrory Gardens.
“They’re definitely a northern plant,” agrees wildlife botanist Dave Ode of the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department in Pierre.
“They do extend down into Nebraska, but not much farther south than that.”
The Lakota called this prairie flower that grows no taller than an inch or two “hoki cekpa,” or “child’s navel.”
Later, Northern European immigrants dubbed it “pasque” - a French word and Hebrew variant on “passover” - because of its annual arrival each Easter.
Over time, it has taken on a lot of other descriptive names as well: prairie smoke, goslinweed, prairie crocus, Easter flower and wind flower.
“My mother called them Mayflowers,” Monsees recalls. “When I was big enough to barely start walking, I’d walk up the hill to see those Mayflowers. Back then, there were so many of them.”
Back then, a child such as Monsees playing among the pasqueflowers on the family ground near Ellis lived in a far different time and place, one where treasures such as buffalo skulls and arrowheads would reveal themselves when least expected.
Here and there were depressions in the landscape left behind by 19th century shod shanties that had been home to Ole Rolvaag’s giants in the earth. As he took his turn plowing, 14-year-old Lyle Monsees would uncover the old clay doll heads with their black hair and eyelashes that had belonged to the pioneer children, or the bottoms of hand-blown whiskey bottles, or a cast-iron skillet, or maybe a few square nails.
Sometimes badgers did the uncovering for him, and young Monsees would swear that the bone he was staring at atop one of the many unmarked graves in the area was the shoulder blade of some adolescent who had met his demise on the prairie decades earlier.
“Could be somebody who died working on the railroad when it was coming through,” he speculates. “Could be squatters. I could be mistaken; maybe it was from a deer.”
A child’s mind conjures all kinds of possibilities. Asked what he thinks the correct answer is, the old man in the truck just shrugs.
But he’s gotten off topic here. Monsees, who resides at the Veterans Administration Medical Center now, has returned to the family land to talk about pasqueflowers, and how he used to come up to this field with his little spade to pluck a few of them from the ground to be transplanted into his mother’s garden, and how there were so many more of them back then.
He’s right of course, said Graper of McCrory Gardens. As land has come out of the Conservation Reserve Program and remnants of the prairie have vanished to the forces of plowing and cultivation and grazing, “we’re seeing fewer of those native plants,” he said.
“Pasque is one of those plants that is not a real robust plant that’s going to take over an area and make itself known anyway,” Graper said. “It’s a quiet little plant in the under storage of taller plants. It takes a while to get itself established. If it’s removed by plowing and cultivation for a number of years, it’s just not going to pop right back up.”
While it could be that the pasque lit up a field in subtle hues of lavender and pink and purple once upon a time, they tend not to flower in close proximity to one another today, said Gary Larson, a native plant expert at SDSU.
“They’re usually scattered, maybe several feet apart,” Larson said. Or as in the case of Monsees’ hilltop, maybe dozens of yards apart.
But they still are out there, Larson and Graper said, especially along hilltops where they don’t have much competition from grasses, or on the edge of ravines, or in rocky places. Ode, the wildlife botanist in Pierre, said you’ll find a lot of them in the Black Hills.
They show up East River in state parks such as Newton Hills, on the Sioux Prairie near Colman, and at the Oak Lake Field Station in northeast Brookings County.
“Out here in Pierre, I have them on my hillside,” Ode said. “But the thing is, you don’t have a very long window to see them … between Easter and the first of May, and that’s it.”
By mid-June, the wind and heat have shriveled their leaves to nothing, and they are dormant for another year.
Forgotten, Monsees is afraid, and growing more so as each succeeding year seems to thin their numbers again.
As he peers out over his hillside, through a looking glass filled with images only his mind can see, Lyle Monsees still can picture his beloved Mayflowers. He’s just sad that nobody else sees them, or that people don’t really understand what they have meant to this state.
“It’s always important to maintain a connection with the past … for the same reason that the preservation of any plant or animal is important,” he said. “I just worry if that’s still happening anymore.”
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Information from: Argus Leader, https://www.argusleader.com
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