WORTHINGTON - The kids always went to the fairgrounds on the day before the fair began. It was an exciting time. A truck might pull up loaded with horses for the merry-go-round. A while later there would be another truck with the seats for the Ferris wheel. A couple of guys unloaded the tilt-a-whirl and started setting it up.
One summer a bold kid came upon the original stage coach that once made the trips from Worthington to the bend in the Big Sioux River where Sioux Falls was emerging. The coach was at the back of the cattle barn, in the shadows and surrounded by other earlier-day wagons. We all knew what a stage coach was, of course. We had seen the Saturday afternoon movies. We had no way of knowing this coach once belonged to the late, illustrious Daniel Shell who, among many things, helped design the Minnesota state capitol. We didn’t study local history.
After the stage coach was pushed into the sunlight, the kids settled over it like bees in a daisy patch. There were kids in the driver’s seat, kids on the roof, kids on the seats inside. Half-a-dozen guys tried to push it, but that didn’t work well.
I know the coach was rolled out once again the next summer. Beyond this, I don’t know its fate. Probably it was crushed and hauled to the dump. Perhaps it was burned. There came a summer when we never saw it again.
The first coach on the local prairie rolled in 1861. Next year - 1862 - it stopped. The Dakota had begun a war with the settlers. The route of the coach was from Yankton to Sioux Falls. It carried mostly mail.
The stage line became known as the Worthington Stage, for all the fact that it began at Blue Earth and rolled through Worthington and Sioux Falls on its way to Yankton. There soon came to be a second stage line, the Sibley Stage, which rolled from Sibley to Sioux Falls and then south to Sioux City.
People indeed rode those dusty stages. It was all they had, save for a horse. A passenger who climbed aboard a stage at Sioux Falls - 6:30 a.m. - was told he would arrive at Sioux City about 16 hours later, “about 10 p.m.”
Stage coach passenger service began on a regular schedule in late 1862, after the Dakota war. It continued through 16 years, snowdrifts and dust, 1862 to 1878. The stage left Worthington for the west at 8 each morning, except for Sunday. There were barns at Valley Springs where the stage stopped to change horses - two teams, four horses.
Worthington had been the nearest point on the railroad, connecting Mankato and Sioux City. In 1876 the railroad began to push west from Worthington to Sioux Falls. By 1877 the stage still ran but only between Luverne and Sioux Falls. Price of a ticket was $2.50.
The concern for building a railroad was pushed only incidentally by most people. In January, 1876, it was determined the new farmers in Minnehaha County had 300,000 bushels of wheat in storage. Cornfields produced from 50 to 60 bushels an acre. To move this bumper crop, the new farmers were hitching teams to wagons and beginning the day-long trip to the empty boxcars at Worthington.
Railroad construction inched ahead, rail by rail. It arrived at Sioux Falls on July 31, 1878, Sioux Falls newspapers were announcing, “It’s here! Goodbye stage coach!” There was celebration in what they were calling South Dakota’s Queen City.
And somehow one of those coaches endured through more than half-a-century tucked away in deep shadows in the cattle barn on the Nobles County fairgrounds. I hope we are doing better now with the remnants of our history. I wish there were people who would give lectures on local history. This has never been tried, but it would be fascinating -
Kids – how would you like to make the trip to Sioux Falls in a stage coach? Can you be ready to roll at 8 tomorrow morning? You got a nice warm coat and a good pair of mittens? We are on our way to the west - South Dakota.
Ray Crippen is a former editor of the Daily Globe. His column is published on Saturdays.
