This life-size bull elk will be installed permanently at Mountain View Cemetery in Rapid City, SD.

Telling the story of life on the prairie is incomplete without the bison, the main resource of generations of Native peoples who called this region their home.  The Grand River once knew vast herds of bison, unconfined by fences, as it now knows cattle and sheep that are moved from pasture to pasture by ranchers on horseback.

To do this majestic creature justice, I again began with a clay model that would be cast into bronze.  With calipers, I measured angles in inches that were translated into feet.  Then, I sorted through Geno’s oil well pipe for the sturdy legs and framework.  It was the same pipe Geno had bought by the truckload for corral construction, and that I had used on Effie’s gate.  Thankfully, he had a lot left over.

It had become kind of a puzzle to see how many bronze castings I could fit into a design; for this one I used nearly two-dozen, from wildlife to Mount Rushmore.  I also incorporated an abstract bald eagle—an indigenous resident of The Grand—with its wing sweeping back along the right side of the bison’s hump.

Dakotah represented an important turning point in my discovery of this new body of work.  While envisioning the multitude of possibilities and experimenting in the shop, I had fantastic Technicolor dreams that fueled my twilight hours.  An exciting, artistic adrenaline high carried me through workdays that stampeded into weeks, months, and eventually resulted in one ton’s worth of draped chains, curls of sheet metal, sickle guards, and hunks of cable-wire “hair.”

George Burns lives north of Morristown, South Dakota. George had one of the largest collections of John Deere tractors in the tri-county region, along with the mother lode of harnesses—including the U-shaped, metal hames sections through which the reins are threaded—and tractor seats, brass bells, and on, and on. He still has the tractors, but unfortunately for George, a prairie fire blew through his place and burned down the buildings that housed the treasure trove. The burned parts, which were tempered by the fire, were not collectible anymore, and had lost their value to antique collectors. So, buried under sheets of charred tin, they were free for the taking.

My friend Kenny Tomac and I dug through the ruins to find so many plow discs that the Friesian ended up with eight, giving it a more unified feel than the other horses in the Grand River Series. I used the hames for the muscles in the neck and hind leg, a pitchfork in the neck, steel scoop shovels for the shoulders, and real horse shoes on the hooves.

Friesians, which are large but nimble animals with unusually long, wavy manes and tails, were used for pulling wagons and other work before they were refined into smooth-gliding show horses. Their ancestors are believed to have carried knights into battle during the Middle Ages. Today, Friesians are popular in many areas of horse showing, including harness and dressage. They are also replacing the Thoroughbreds that once graced the paddocks and stables at Historic Runnymede Farms—where the 1968 Kentucky Derby winner named Dancer’s Image, originated, and where this sculpture was placed. The farm asked me to depart from my usual raw-metal style, preferring a silver-black paint to reflect the glossy, dramatic coloring of the Friesian breed.

Happily, the burnt barns were the only casualties related to the Friesian project, although Kenny experienced a near miss. We had filled my pickup with all kinds of crispy, wonderful finds, and were on our last round. I thought I heard a little girl scream—but it was just Kenny, who had stepped on a rusty nail. A guy who knows his way around a construction site and builds low-carbon-footprint cabins, he refused the trip to town for a tetanus shot. I just poured him another cup of tea.

A bull, cow and calf American Bison are on the move across the plains of South Dakota. Commissioned by National Harbor in Maryland these three life-sized American Bison were unveiled on veterans day in 2022.

This life-size Tiger was fabricated by John Lopez using old farm equipment. It will be permanently installed in-front of the Highschool in Mobridge, SD.

Revisiting a masterpiece from 190 BC. John recreates Nike of Samothrace from discarded farm equipment. You can see Nike in person where she greets visitors at the entrance of John's sculpture garden in Lemmon, SD.

Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota is the home of the Wolves. This life-size wolf sculpture is fabricated from cut steel and permanently installed on NSU’s campus.

My mom loved it when my brother-in-law Stuart would hook up his plow team to feed the cows.  He would talk to them, “Up, Dolly, up Queen!”  One little difference in his voice—a touch softer or louder, clipped or relaxed—meant to side-step or slow down, speed up or pull harder, or “do it now or else we won’t make it to the top of the hill!”  Horses like this used to make the world go round.

For generations of pre-industrial farmers, draft horses—“draft” or “draught” comes from the Old English “dragan,” which means to draw or haul—literally carried the weight of progress on their shoulders.  They were bred for a combination of traits: tall stature, muscular build, upright shoulders and strong hindquarters for pulling strength, and docile temperament.  They were smart, loyal animals that worked fields, hauled hay, pulled tree stump