A young writer’s visit to the Black Hills in 1895 led to an award-winning book in 2008. Eva Katharine Gibson of Chicago climbed aboard a Concord coach in Hot Springs, South Dakota, in the summer of 1895, and its six horses hauled her and eleven other passengers over the hills to Wind Cave. Gibson described the cave as a “fitting palace for some primeval gnome king.”
Returning to Chicago, Gibson wrote a fairy tale about a South Dakota farm girl named Annie, prairie dogs in the Black Hills, and gnomes in Wind Cave. Over a hundred years later, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press republished the story as The Prairie-Dog Prince. The book received the 2008 Mom’s Choice Award for its illustrations by Cricket magazine artist Carolyn Digby Conahan.
Gibson came to the Black Hills with her husband, Charles B. Gibson, who was a metallurgist and chemist. He taught at the Chicago College of Dental Surgery and worked privately as an assayer and mining engineer. In the summer of 1895, he was investigating mining claims in the Custer and Keystone area for a group of Illinois investors. Later, he would do the chemical analysis of Evans Plunge that is still on record.
Eva Gibson was a celebrity in her own right. A member of bohemian literary circles in Chicago, she had written five novels, some under her maiden name of Eva Clapp. Descended from early New England settlers, Gibson claimed American Indian ancestry, and the South Dakota landscape and its American Indian inhabitants fascinated her. After her 1895 trip, she set stories and plays in the state and always included Indian characters. None of these manuscripts, now housed at the University of Illinois, was ever published.
Immediately after her trip to Wind Cave, Gibson published an account in the Chicago Sunday Chronicle, providing a good description of the cave in that era. “There is a rough but comfortable little hostelry near the cave and at this we alight,” Gibson wrote. After putting on “little canvas caps,” the group marched “across a little gully spanned by a bridge of rough boards into a small cabin built over the entrance.”
Inside the cave, Gibson admired its honeycomb structures, and her imagination took over. “Old German legends come to mind of the toiling, delving little people of the under world, until it would seem quite in keeping if we should suddenly see a small gnome peeping out from behind a rock or trundling a wheelbarrow full of glistening crystals,” she wrote.
Gibson struggled to put this concept into an adult novel or play, but not until L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared in 1900 did she think to use the material in a children’s book. In 1901, Gibson published her juvenile novel Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch, which is set on a prairie farm near the Black Hills and in the underground kingdom of Wind Cave. The Chicago Record-Herald reviewed the book with enthusiasm, noting that its heroine’s “prairie home and occupations in South Dakota would stand alone as a pretty diversion for children.”
When the South Dakota State Historical Society Press decided to use Gibson’s work as the third story in its Prairie Tale Series, it condensed the original novel into a thirty-two-page picture book called The Prairie-Dog Prince. This adaptation focuses on the South Dakota adventures of Annie, a young girl who befriends a gnome prince disguised as a prairie dog. Making some unwise wishes about her father finding gold in the Black Hills, Annie is whisked underground like Alice in Wonderland to the home of the gnomes, where she learns some important lessons. Meeting up with her prince once again, she returns home through the entrance to Wind Cave.
For more information about The Prairie-Dog Prince or the Prairie Tale Series, see www.sdshspress.com or www.prairie-tale.com, or call 605-773-8161.
