The Forgotten Lawmen Part 1 - The Life and Adventures of a South Dakota Game Warden

I was just 23 years old when I was hired as a game warden for the State of South Dakota in 1983. I was assigned to the Moody County Warden District headquartered in the town of Flandreau. My district encompassed roughly 800 square miles of intensely farmed private land in east-central South Dakota.

Although I had extensive experience working seasonal jobs for the game and fish department during and after college, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. In hindsight, it’s probably just as well I didn’t know. No one said the job of a state game warden was going to be easy. If they had they’d either be a fool or a liar. I find both equally intolerable.

My district included all of Moody County and a small portion of Lake County, which bordered Moody County to the west. It was a relatively busy district despite its small size and population. It was located north of the Sioux Falls metro area, east of Madison, south of Brookings and South Dakota State University, and west of the Minnesota state line.

Whitetail deer and furbearing animals were plentiful as were countless species of waterfowl on a seasonal basis. Moody County was too intensely farmed with too many ground predators to sustain much of a pheasant population.

The Big Sioux River cut the county in half east and west. Despite its narrow channel, dirty appearance, and low, late-summer flows, the Big Sioux River and its unique mixture of woody habitat was teeming with fish and wildlife. The Big Sioux River was teeming with something else. It was teeming with criminals.

I had two main recreational lakes in my district: Lake Campbell southwest of Brookings and Brant Lake north of Chester. Brant Lake was a challenge to work even on a good day. But it couldn’t compare to the sheer insanity I routinely encountered at Lake Campbell. I was quickly learning just how dangerous and unpredictable it was to provide law enforcement services to lake users who didn’t want a game warden around. Gearing up and heading out to work the Big Sioux River or the lakes on a hot summer weekend or the Fourth of July made me feel queasy, as if I were riding in a Higgins boat just before hitting the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima. Not quite, but almost.

At the top of my equipment list was my patrol vehicle, a two-wheel drive pickup with emergency lights and police siren installed. It was further equipped with special switches to kill the brake and tail lights and a military blackout light on the front bumper to add stealthiness while patrolling at night.

I carried a Smith and Wesson Model 66 .357 magnum revolver in a breakfront, or clam shell, holster. I carried two speedloaders loaded with six rounds each and a set of Smith and Wesson handcuffs on my duty belt.

I had a Smith and Wesson 12-gauge pump-action shotgun that as a matter of personal preference I kept loaded with rifled slugs instead of the more traditional double ought buckshot. The Smith and Wesson revolver was extremely durable and reliable enough but its companion piece shotgun was an unreliable, low-bid, short-stroke catastrophe.

One officer fed up with the frequent malfunctions used his state-issued shotgun as a truncheon to kill a porcupine caught in a foothold trap and somehow managed to bend the barrel. He used the rear bumper of his patrol vehicle as a vice of sorts to straighten the barrel but to no avail. The imperturbable porcupine assassin later claimed he tallied higher shotgun qualification scores after he bent the barrel.

Another officer chewed sunflower seeds while on duty and spit the spent hulls out the window of his patrol vehicle as he was motoring down the highway. Many of the spit-soaked hulls blew back inside his vehicle and landed on his uncased shotgun, which was stored behind the driver’s seat. So many hulls managed to infiltrate the nooks and crannies of his shotgun over time it was rendered all but useless and the only thing the officer could justifiably say in his defense was “The shotgun was useless, anyway.”

I had two truly remarkable patrol boats. The larger of the two was an 18-foot Sea Nymph with an 80-horsepower Mariner motor. The other was a 12-foot jon boat with a 9.8-horsepower Mercury motor. The former was used for lake patrol and search and rescue operations while the latter was used for patrolling the Big Sioux River and other types of work requiring a boat that could operate reliably in shallow water.

I was really fond of the Sea Nymph until someone from the maintenance crew in Sioux Falls took an indelible black marker and added an “o” to the end of Nymph on both sides of the boat, forever changing the name of my beloved patrol boat from Sea Nymph to the highly provocative Sea Nympho.

I had outstanding optics. The binoculars were vintage naval glasses from World War II. The clarity of vision was remarkable. I had a 22-power spotting scope that came with an accessory window mount. I soon learned the window-mounted spotting scope was one of the most valuable tools in my equipment inventory.

These were the years before field training programs wherein a game warden recruit enters an extensive eight-month training pipeline and is only assigned a duty station after successfully completing the training requirements. I received only the most cursory training and was working my district for nine months before I entered the state training academy. I graduated from the academy in May 1984 after five weeks of training.

I was now a fully-certified state peace officer and a member of the state constabulary subject to activation by the governor in the event of a state emergency. There was a problem, however. South Dakota game wardens did not have full law enforcement authority. Their authority to enforce state laws was limited by statute.

An untrained citizen acting under the scope of the citizen’s arrest statute had more authority to enforce state laws than a fully-trained state game warden. Little has changed. No law enforcement officer in the State of South Dakota has less authority to enforce state laws than a game warden.

My law enforcement authority notwithstanding, the goal of my law enforcement efforts was to increase voluntary compliance with the state’s wildlife and boating laws. How I did that was up to me. I could use proactive measures like public outreach and high-visibility, uniformed patrol. I could use more traditional reactive measures like writing tickets, making arrests, and issuing written or verbal warnings. I used experience and the totality of the circumstances to guide my decisions. I even gave it a name. I called it the “compliance continuum.”

There was one guaranteed deal-breaker in the compliance continuum. A written or verbal warning would change into a ticket the moment I caught a violator in a lie. I could neither abide nor reward lying, and I always made sure to tell the violator his decision to lie took away both my ability and my willingness to use discretion. I wanted them to remember that admonition the next time they dealt with a law enforcement officer.

I didn’t work under a quota system or “minimum standards” as they’re now called. The public hated quota systems when I was working and I’m guessing the public still hates them. A law enforcement officer who works under a quota system can almost count on the person they stopped raising the issue of quotas by asking in a smug and derisive tone if the officer had filled his quota of tickets for the day.

My friend, Trooper Bill, loved two things almost as much as his family: laying carpet and writing traffic tickets. If he had to attend a meeting in some distant part of the state, Bill would leave hours early so he could write tickets en route to the meeting. Bill was a salty old traffic cop who had long grown weary of hearing the same, worn out twaddle about quotas. Without looking up or taking a break from writing the ticket, Trooper Bill would tell the grumbling motorist, “I don’t care about quotas. I can write as many tickets as I want.”

While the public hated quota systems, there was one group that absolutely adored them: defense attorneys. Defense attorneys used quota systems as a legal battering ram to question the judgment of arresting officers and raise the level of reasonable doubt in the eyes of judges and juries. Quotas, it was argued, encouraged officers to make bad decisions. Bad decisions led to bad arrests.

I was self-motivated and didn’t need a quota system or a bureaucratic bean counter to measure the relative success of my law enforcement efforts. As a state game warden, I was expected to make cases that reflected the wildlife resources and outdoor activities particular to my district. That expectation was fair and reasonable. The best part about not working under a quota system was when the local defense attorneys quit asking me if I worked under a quota system during cross-examination.

There is another aspect of being a game warden that makes the job different from other law enforcement professions. Unlike other officers who, like RoboCop, use hi-tech electronic wizardry that tells them when someone is breaking the law, I had to catch criminals the old-fashioned way: by going face-to-face with the public, being inquisitive, and asking questions.

I was excited but rightly apprehensive about my new career. My district had been without a game warden living and working within its boundaries for twenty-five years. I would be going toe-to-toe with two generations of hardened poachers who had grown accustomed to not having to look over their shoulder before they pulled the trigger. It would be an understatement to say the notion of a game warden patrolling previously...