Paths Upon the Prairie

"Paths Upon the Prairie" is the story of the imprint of my grandfather, Roy Eugene Backus, on the South Dakota prairie. He was the son of a South Dakota settler around Geddes in Charles Mix County where he was born in January 1886. He was a homesteader, teacher, school superintendent, and Navy accountant in the Pentagon during World War II. After returning to South Dakota as a Superintendent and teacher he became a lapidary artist producing rings and pendants to sell both locally and in his Rock Shop in Custer in the summers. Roy Backus homesteaded around the rolling hills leading to the Black Hills in an area called Smithwick. He had to dodged Indians at a juncture of roads at Wounded Knee to make it to Smithwick. He met his wife Ethel, who was homesteading with her brothers. After marriage he took course work at the University of Chicago while Ethel obtained a diploma from the Chicago Conservatory in speech, drama, acting and other thespian capabilities. He decided to work in a bank to support her finishing her education. Soon after, came their first son, Aaron in 1912, and grandfather decided to become a teacher to support them. They moved to South Dakota and he finished his education as Salutatorian of his Dakota Wesleyan class in 1916. He took his first teaching and superintendent position in the small community of Wagner. With the birth of their fourth child, Lucille, in 1918, Ethel became a manic depressive threatening the two young girls including my mother, Minnette, who was born in 1915. Thus began the family saga of separation with doctor's orders. Ethel moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where family members had moved. Then Roy suffered persecution by Ethel's brothers with garnishment of wages when they could locate him, successive losses of teaching and accounting positions; eventually picking berries to survive in Spokane, prior to her death 1932. He finally had to find my mother who had been given away while living with Grandma Coburn in Carroll, Iowa. After Ethel's death in Oklahoma, he reconstituted the family at Dakota Wesleyan where he worked as an accountant, so his two sons and two daughters could attend college free.