Henrymillerinsd

Henry Miller in South Dakota

In the 1880s, two of my great-great-grandfather’s brothers,
Lucien and Henry Miller, emigrated to South Dakota, taking their aged father, Lewis Miller, with them. Lucien left behind the
bodies of two infant daughters who are buried in the Stanbro cemetery near
Beaver Meadow along with his mother, Minerva Clark Miller, and his brother Silas,
but his two sons went with him. One, Lewis, only lived a short time, but Walter
became the father of nine children.

Inez didn’t put this story in the genealogy, but my grandmother told me that Henry had "had to get married," and didn’t want to. At the altar he turned to the woman and said, "You can kiss my ass," walked out of the church and immediately packed up and headed West. He came back once to visit the family, and she remembers him as a lovely, sweet man who paid a lot of attention to each of the girls.

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Rush Miller, made at
least one trip west to see his brothers — or perhaps it was when his father
died. Two things he had brought back from that trip always hung in my
grandparents’ “back room”: an Indian
peace pipe carved of red stone, and a terrifying club made of a round,
fist-sized rock fixed with leather bands to a wooden shaft that was decorated
with tiny glass beads; both were authentic articles he had received in some sort of meeting with native Indians in the Dakotas. It was always a big treat when my grandparents took
these things down off the wall and let us handle them.

Aunt Inez, Grandma, and my Aunt Meredith always maintained
connections with this branch of the family, keeping up a correspondence by mail
and going a few times to visit. Some of the South Dakota
relatives also came back here. My cousin Barbara and I corresponded with one of
our South Dakota cousins, Nancy, when we were teenagers, and Barbara eventually went out there in 1971 to school at South Dakota State – amusingly known as SDS U.