Pioneering in Dakota

The plowed fireguards the bronze calls vitally necessary followed a set method: settlers broke two narrow strips of sod a short distance apart and burned the grass between them, leaving a bare ring around the buildings, and they set backfires and beat flames down with wet sacks. None of it saved the barn here. Linda Hasselstrom's Roadside History of South Dakota calls Guri possibly the first person to die in a prairie fire in Dakota Territory. The fires kept coming: one in western Brown County on November 15, 1905, ran twenty miles long and five wide.

What the plaque says

Pioneering in Dakota Prairie Fires Pioneering was never easy. In Dakota, drought, and grasshoppers, blizzards, and prairie fires were all occupational hazards. In sparse timbered areas, the settlers lived in dugouts and sod houses, enduring the hardships common to all frontiersmen. Betsy Dalager, a widow with five children, accompanied by her mother, Guri, (Mrs. Peder Anderson Schobakken) migrated from Glenwood, Minnesota to Raritan township, Day County in May, 1884, by oxdrawn wagon. By 1886, they had a house, a barn, a well, several cows, and the vitally necessary plowed fireguards. On April 17, John Dodd, living three miles to the south, set a fire to burn out his slough. A strong wind took his fire beyond control. It fired the haystacks near the barn. Betsy and Guri, in seeking to save the livestock, were trapped by the fire in the burning barn. Betsy ran out, her clothes aflame, and jumped in the well. The barn became Guri's funeral pyre. The children had sought safety in the plowed firebreak and after the hot earth had cooled, helped their mother out of the well. Betsy lived through a long battle with burns, but rheumatism left her a cripple. For 36 years this slight figure in a wheel chair was the symbol of the indom- itable spirit which had brought her to Day County. This episode happened four and one quarter miles west from this marker. This marker is designed as a tribute to the courage of those who suffered tribulation and deprivation in the settlement of Day County. It is believed by kinsman to be the first recorded death by a prairie fire in what is now South Dakota. Erected by the great-grandchildren of Guri Schobakken, who 80 years later called South Dakota their home: Herman Chilson, Borghild Peters, Esther Chilson, Clara Lee, and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Sisseton Historic State Park — 14 mi
  A stone fort on the Coteau des Prairies built to watch the Dakota after 1862, renamed for the Sisseton who scouted for it, restored by the WPA and saved again by a boy who grew up loving it.
• Sica Hollow State Park — 24 mi
  Wooded ravines on the edge of the Coteau, on the Lake Traverse Reservation, where the springs run iron-red and the Dakota tell of a good land gone bad.
• Joseph N. Nicollet Tower and Interpretive Center — 24 mi
  A tower on the edge of the Coteau des Prairies honoring the French mapmaker who drew this country in 1838 and 1839 and kept the Dakota names on the map.

More markers nearby

• The Fight at Webster — 8.0 mi
• Edgar S. McFadden — 8.0 mi
• Sigurd Anderson — 8.0 mi
• WWII Plane Crash Holds Memories — 8.0 mi