Alcohol, Whiteclay an issue from the beginning

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BY KEVIN ABOUREZK / Lincoln Journal Star

He blamed the whiskey ranches for the deaths of at least six ranchers and Lakota.

And Valentine McGillycuddy — the man in charge of the Pine Ridge Agency — wanted them closed.

Since Whiteclay's origin, alcohol peddlers have sold their goods to the Lakota people there. But for 22 years, that was not the case.

In 1882, President Chester Arthur responded to pleas to end alcohol sales near the reservation by setting aside a 50-square-mile buffer zone south of Pine Ridge.

President Theodore Roosevelt reopened the zone to settlement in 1904.

But some argue alcohol sales should again be outlawed in Whiteclay to protect the Lakota.

"If that's what was done then, why can't we try it now?" asked state Sen. Don Preister of Omaha.

He introduced a bill in the Nebraska Legislature in 2002 that would have recreated the buffer zone. It failed.

After Roosevelt reopened the buffer zone, nearly 100 settlers were given land there, including Tom Dewing. The town took Dewing's name for less than a year.

A post office named after nearby White Clay Creek was established in late 1904. The town has been popularly known as Whiteclay since, although its official name remains Dewing.

At the time of its founding, the town offered whiskey, supplies, groceries and prostitutes, according to early settlers. Alcohol sales to Natives were prohibited, but that doesn't appear to have ended the trade.

A former Whiteclay business owner recalls the town becoming especially rowdy after 1954, when the ban against alcohol sales to Natives was lifted and the Lakota began drinking with white people in local bars.

A decade later, Mary Eckholt found the town populated mostly by non-Native people.

Eckholt, who owns Mary's Gift Shop in Whiteclay, said some 100 people lived in the town when she moved there in the 1960s to run a hardware store with her husband.

In fact, she raised five daughters there and said she has never had any problem with drinkers.

"The minute I landed here I felt like I was home," the 76-year-old said. "I loved it."

Paul "Skee" Cedar Face has a different recollection.

The 54-year-old remembers fights taking place during the 1960s inside a chain link fence by a grocery store. The town, he said, has long been rampant with rumors of prostitution.

"If you wanted to see something, you just took a trip up to Whiteclay and got an eyeful," he said.

Around the 1970s, Whiteclay bar owners stopped selling alcohol for consumption inside, the common theory being their establishments had become too rowdy.

The Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 appears to have raised tension between white business owners and tribal members. Native activists blamed the town for alcohol-related car wrecks, murders and diseases on the reservation.

Entrepreneurs seem to have taken advantage of that backlash in the 1970s, opening gas stations and grocery stores in Pine Ridge that siphoned revenue from Whiteclay.

Where once the town had a hardware store and filling stations, Whiteclay's main businesses now are two grocery stores and three beer stores.

"If I didn't have the Native American people, I might as well lock my doors," Mary Eckholt said.