Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 7

It's Wednesday evening, card playing night at the 73 Bar downtown. A small neon sign glows red outside the plain brick building, and people are starting to filter in. The Philip volunteer fire department has finished up a safety class across town at the station, so there's a good turnout.

I ask some patrons how the town got it's name. I'm told it's named after rancher Scotty Philip (the high school's sports teams are called the Scotties) who's credited with saving the buffalo from extinction.

A little research reveals that as a slight exaggeration.

Until the mid-1800s, millions of buffalo wandered this part of the continent, some in herds miles wide. Then the railroads hired sharpshooters to harvest them to

Rick Losleben, who owns an auto body shop and a farm near Sleepy Eye, Minn., lives so close to the tracks he can't carry on a phone conversation if the windows are open when the trains roll by.

help feed hungry workers who were building the nation's first transcontinental line. Hundreds of thousands more were slaughtered for sport and left to rot on the plains.

By 1900, there were only a few thousand buffalo left, most of them on ranches and in zoos. Philip bought a herd of about 50 of the animals and eventually built it up to 400 head. After Scotty died in 1911, his two sons took over the operation. They sold about 60 animals to the state of South Dakota, which made them the nucleus of a herd at Custer State Park that now numbers about 1,500.

At the bar, patrons are more interested in talking about the high school football team, which is undefeated and appears headed for another trip to the state tournament, than discussing the DM&E's expansion plans.

"There was concern (about the project) at first," says Mark Foley, who works for Midwest Cooperative, the company that owns the Philip grain elevator. "But then the DM&E people came down and told us that even though coal is going to be their main business, they're still going to haul our grain."

Although the town doesn't have one of South Dakota's largest elevators, a sizeable amount of grain passed through its metal storage bins last fall: 1.5 million bushels of wheat, 750,000 bushels of millet and several thousand bushels of oats and corn.

"Shipping by rail saves money from Point A to Point B," Foley says. "So we'd be hurt financially if the DM&E were to start hauling only coal."

The DM&E's Schieffer, who grew up on a small farm in Nebraska, says most people in the farm-based small towns of South Dakota and Minnesota have taken him at his word that the railroad will continue to haul grain if the expansion project is approved.

Nonetheless, he says he's working on a document that would make that commitment binding.

"I believe in putting things on paper," Schieffer says. "Because I could be gone tomorrow."

I spend the night at Philip's Motel West. Just inside the door is a bulletin board strewn with advertisements for bull semen, livestock sales and the latest standings for the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association saddle bronc riding competition. It's a reminder that I'm still in the West.

The next day I head toward the heart of the state's grain country.