We drove through Cottonwood Creek and mud was flying everywhere,” she said. “There wasn’t even a road all the way between Pine Ridge and Scenic then. Knowing her dad’s determined ways, she reluctantly agreed to take a ride. Twila Merrill rode wild broncs before she 'settled down' in Scenic. “When I got home, Dad told me Bud (my brother) was going to show me a bar and a house in Scenic that I was supposed to buy,” recalled Twila. Twila drove all night to get back to Pine Ridge, fearing someone had been hurt in an accident. She was mending from injuries in Omaha when her father, a longtime Pine Ridge Reservation trader and rancher, telephoned to say there was an emergency. Twila Merrill was riding rodeo stock, not barrels and poles that are usually the domain of the womenfolk, but the real thing: bucking broncs. Scenic is a company town these days, owned lock, stock and longhorn by a single corporation and run by a petite, pony-tailed woman who came to this windswept place against her will in 1963.

Meanwhile, her mother cooked and served all the evidence before the sheriff arrived. “Hap,” a non-Catholic, went to the parish priest to confess and ease his conscience. Once, her dad bought “black market” meat and he felt guilty about it - maybe because he learned that officials from Rapid City were planning to investigate. Mary’s dad, “Happy” Hynes, ran a bar that competed with the Longhorn. Mary Avenell of Yankton, the granddaughter of Hynes, said growing up in Scenic in the 1950s meant living shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most colorful people in North America. She brought her 20 cows up, staked a claim, built a sod house and made a life for herself. She was told that the only land not homesteaded was an inaccessible spot atop Sheep Mountain, so Mary and her boys clawed their way up the mountain, and were delighted with the view and the rich, flat grasslands. Saw dust is thick on the floor and patrons rest on oil barrels affixed with metal tractor seats.Īll the flat land on the outskirts of the Badlands was claimed by the time Mary Hynes and her eleven children arrived. Selling alcohol to Indians was then a federal crime, so Jefferson ended up in jail.īrands from local ranches decorate the ceiling of the Longhorn Bar, where almost nothing has changed for many years. Ab drank too much of his own merchandise, and sold some of the rest to his Indian neighbors. When a May blizzard pushed all of Ab’s cattle over the edge of Sheep Mountain, he decided to open a saloon. Scenic’s very first businessman, according to Hall, was bad-luck rancher Ab Jefferson. The town site below Sheep Mountain has long been a “last stop” for travelers arriving in the Black Hills. Traders, trappers, homesteaders, drunken monkeys, saloon-keepers, missionaries, rodeo champions, bikers, gamblers and other interesting sorts have called Scenic home. 'Every town has its characters, but in Scenic the characters had a town,” wrote Philip Hall in the book Reflections of the Badlands.

Scenic certainly can boast that it has South Dakota's most unique main street. You can find this story and more like it in our book, South Dakota's Best Stories. Several years back, our publisher Bernie Hunhoff wrote this story about Scenic and its residents. The buildings may belong to someone else, but the true legacy of Scenic lies with its unique and colorful characters. EDITOR'S NOTE: The little cowboy town of Scenic, South Dakota, located on the western edge of the Badlands, received local and national attention this week when Twila Merrill, who owns much of the town, put it up for sale.

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