SCOUTING YESTERDAY | The South Dakotan who dreamed up Mount Rushmore publishes first textbook

This week in South Dakota history: Dec. 5-11

Doane Robinson (Courtesy of South Dakota State Historical Society)

The visionary behind Mount Rushmore who today remains among the most influential South Dakotans in state history published his first textbook 125 years ago this week.

But Doane Robinson’s account of the area’s history preceding the Lewis and Clark expedition in A History of South Dakota From Earliest Times — reported on in The Madison Daily Leader in December of 1900 — proved to be a mere footnote in a life that had found him publishing newspapers, cheerleeding for his homestate across the country and sparking the decades long effort that a now-infamous sculptor would undertake to etch the faces of four presidents into a Black Hills rockside.

Salvation Army's annual Sioux Falls $20 bill challenge coming Saturday