An ancient petrified tree in Perkins County may be one of the largest ever discovered, and may eventually tell us more about what kind of landscape existed here in the ancient past.
"My father and a friend of his discovered it while herding sheep back in the 1930s," recalls retired local rancher Clyde Jesfjeld. "They decided that it had to be a tree because of the way it appeared."
Contemporary newspaper articles confirm that it was George Jesfjeld and Charles Murphy who first discovered the tree, Northwest of Bison, South Dakota.
"Word got around, and back in those days the WPA was in operation. There was a small crew that came in and unearthed more of it than what my father and his friend had uncovered."
Over the years, there have been several efforts to partially excavate and examine the tree. In 1949, the Rapid City Journal reported that University of South Dakota Museum Director Dr. W.H. Over visited the site, and estimated the tree's age at sixty million years. The same article listed its measurements as nine feet in diameter at the exposed base, with eighty-four feet uncovered, extending to as much as two hundred feet total as it disappears beneath the sloping ground.
Fred Jennewein, a Bison-area rancher who ran a small range relics museum in town, was active in the effort to excavate the tree. "In the 75 feet of exposed log," wrote Jennewein, "there is no break thru [sic] the trunk of the tree altho [sic] in recent years there has been some vandalism by shelling off considerable sized pieces of the petrified wood."
Today, the base of the tree — which is located on a School and Public Lands parcel, but not accessible by road — can still be seen, though much of tree has been re-interred with earth. Away from the exposed base, an occasional glimpse of petrified wood emerges from beneath the surface.
At one time, some locals hoped that the entire tree would be uncovered or excavated. "When the summer comes again we are going out with a bulldozer or some other kind of dozer and find out just how much farther that Oldest Old Timer goes back into that hill," wrote Jennewein."
That does not appear to have happened. After the 1950's, newspaper articles about the tree are scarce. Though there had been some talk of removing the tree intact, that would be a difficult, expensive job. In 1967, the state legislature allocated $1,200 to place a fence around the site, probably to prevent its gradual disappearance.
"I remember as a young boy taking a lot of different people down there so they could look at it," Clyde Jesjfeld recalls. "A lot of people took a small piece."
There is no fence in place, if one was ever built. Souvenir seekers may have forgotten about the tree and its remote location.
"There was discussion about getting the tree hauled out of there and placing it somewhere else where the public could view it," says Mike Cornelison, Land Agent for School and Public Lands. However, any such effort would have to balance protecting the integrity of the native prairie against extracting the tree, a delicate task in its own right.
"If there was the right kind of supervision, it could be excavated," says Cornelison.
So far, the funding has not come forward. Recently, several scientists at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have expressed some interest in visiting the site. Perhaps soon we will learn more about the tree — it's history and potential future.
Is this the biggest intact petrified tree in the world, as some local enthusiasts claimed in the past? That probably depends on how bigness is measured. Maybe the tree can tell us more about the environment it thrived in, back in the days, to quote Fred Jennewein, "when the earth was young."