William Faulkner said that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. South Dakota painter Mick Harrison would agree with that observation. Mick was there when they buried Sitting Bull. Maybe not the first time, but certainly when the bones of the great Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and chief were reinterred near Mobridge in 1953. Mick remembers the event vividly. The local dignitaries, the old cowboys and especially the Lakota, there in full regalia. Some of those present had quite likely been with Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn. That proximity to history, the immediate presence of the past, has much to do with the inspiration for Mick Harrison’s paintings.
Growing up in Mobridge, Mick felt that history all around him. Mobridge was founded near the site of Evarts, or Old Evarts, as it is known by locals, and Evarts had been one of the great railheads for shipping cattle from the Western range to Eastern markets. Big outfits like the Matador, the H A T, Turkey Track, the H O and others sent thousands of head of cattle across the Cheyenne and Standing Rock Reservations toward Evarts on a six-mile wide, eighty-mile long strip that had been leased from the tribes by the Milwaukee Railroad. The land that became his grandfather’s ranch sat just at the end of that strip, west, across the Missouri from Mobridge. Mick worked summers for his grandfather, and the ghosts of the old cowboy days always rode near.
(Read the rest of this story in Summer ‘08 FACES)
