When I stopped in Wall to fill up that morning, I took a picture of the familiar Wall Drug dinosaur and sent it out with a Facebook message that read:
“Stopped for gas (you know where) on a day trip that will see me drive 500 miles round trip to fish for stock-dam bass with a 100-year-old woman.”
Turned out, some of that wasn’t true.
Take the mileage. It was actually closer to 600 miles, because after the fishing I took a side trip to Valentine on the drive home to check out the Niobrara River.
Or the bass. Almost all the action was with bluegills, and most of them were too small to keep.
And the fishing? Well, I didn’t fish at all. Once I settled in next to Eunice Siler in folding chairs along the cattail-decorated shoreline of Dave Steffen’s dam, I was too busy listening and looking to wet a line myself.
It’s not every day, after all, that you get to watch someone fish who has been at it for 95 years.
“I started when I was five,” Eunice said, never glancing my way or taking her eyes off the bobber drifting on the surface about 20 feet away. “I started going with my dad.”
She has been going ever since, first with her father and then her husband, Dick Siler, a businessman in Burke who ran a sporting-goods store that became a magnet for outdoor lovers throughout the region.
They included a lot of youngsters, including Dave Steffen, who is now 74, and Duane Davis, 65. Both are still sort of kids, according to Eunice Siler’s math.
Eunice isn’t sure when she first met Dave. She has met a lot of kids over a century of years, after all. Dave is pretty sure he knows when he first met Eunice.
“I knew her in the first grade, I guess,” Steffen said. “I went to Burke grade school and she substitute taught different classes there. Then her husband had Dick’s Sports Shop, where you could get guns and shells and trapping stuff, whatever you wanted to buy. And the kids loved to go there. Most of us kids around Burke got our first gun at Dick’s. And Eunice was always around there.”
Duane Davis says his memories of Eunice go back to elementary school when he first met a slender lady with red hair and a friendly spirit. And, like Steffen a few years earlier, Davis spent his share of time at Dick’s Sports, getting to know Eunice better there.
Davis grew up to be a popular hired hand around the Burke area with a reputation for being good-natured, handy and reliable. So, when Dick Siler’s health began to fail, he hired Davis to handle yard work and other chores. And after Dick died, Davis just kept helping Eunice.
He also started taking her fish to eat, until one visit when Eunice asked for more than fillets.
“I stopped to drop off some fish and she said: ‘These are good. But I like to fish, too!’” Davis says.
So next time he went fishing, Eunice went, too. And they’ve been pretty hard to separate ever since.
During a typical week, Eunice and Duane will be out fishing somewhere four or five times. Most often these days, they go to Steffen’s dam southwest of Burke. It’s Eunice’s preferred water, and the place I caught up with them during my day trip.
“I take her other places sometimes,” Duane said, answering questions in-between supplying Eunice with fresh worms for the bluegills. “But then if we’re not catching much, she complains that we’re not here. So, we usually end up here.”
And “here” is just the kind of place a 100-year-old angler and her friendly guide might come to appreciate. Dave Steffen built the 10-acre dam, which is more than 20 feet deep in places, with conservation and fishing in mind about 12 years ago as part of a restoration project on a family farm ground.
He had the training and education to make it something special, too.
After college and military service, Steffen worked for the federal Soil Conservation Service in land conservation and restoration. Over the years, he became a native grassland advocate and expert. And before and since his retirement, he has been restoring hard-used land on the original Steffens farm back to native grasses and wildflowers, all of which helps controls sediment and benefits the dam, its water quality and the fishing.
After the dam was built and filled, Steffen and some friends, including Davis, stocked the dam themselves using largemouth bass they caught and transported from dams near Burke. Steffen and another friend also caught 21 nice-sized adult bluegills from a dam on the Fort Pierre National Grasslands.
Twenty of those bluegills survived the ride from the grasslands in an aerated tank back to Steffen’s dam. Steffen added a load of minnows and hasn’t done any stocking since. He did sign a contract with the state Game, Fish & Parks Department that provides open fishing for the public.
No member of the public takes advantage of it more than Eunice Siler, who says she never gets tired of sitting and waiting for a bobber to disappear. But she can multi-task. So, she talked a bit about her life, her love for words — “I used to win all the spelling contests” — and her substitute teaching work.
She said she had an affection for junior-high students that not all educators shared.
“Seventh- and 8th-graders, I guess I liked them,” she said. “Nobody wanted them. But they amused me.”
Eunice also worked as a sheriff’s office dispatcher who sometimes helped transport prisoners to the prison in Sioux Falls or the state hospital in Yankton. She was also called upon one time to help bag a body after a murder.
She also wrote freelance columns and stories for a collection of newspapers, including the Mitchell Daily Republic, Rapid City Journal, Sioux Falls Argus Leader, and Omaha World Herald, as well as United Press International.
So, we had writing to chat about as we waited for the bluegills to bite, which usually didn’t take long. She said she’s a bit of a gambler by nature and enjoys testing her luck at the nearby Rosebud Casino and also at the Legion club in Burke on bingo nights.
She has missed those outings this year, with COVID-19 restrictions shutting down or limiting public gatherings. But she said fishing helps scratch the gambling itch a little bit.
“This is a little like gambling,” she said.
It certainly can seem like a frustrating game of chance on some days and a jackpot-like success on others. They had some jackpot-like fishing a few days before my visit, and a few days after.
But the hot, sunny conditions during my midday visit kept most of the bigger bluegills back in the cattails and under the moss. Eunice managed to get a few nice ones but mostly was teased by light-biting bluegills of five inches or less.
“Overcast and a little south wind is usually the best here,” Davis said.
Undersized bluegills or not, Eunice was clearly having fun. And she admitted as we chatted that her love for those fishing trips wasn’t limited to what she could accomplish with her favorite old Zebco reel in her hands.
She loves the country around the fishing water just as much as the water itself.
“It’s not just catching fish,” she said. “It’s just being out in the country, more than anything else. Fishing’s just a sideline.”
Well, sure. Maybe. But it’s a sideline she still takes pretty seriously, even after 95 years of fishing.
Soon to be 96, by the way. She’ll turn 101 on Aug. 30, which will be cause for another big celebration.
My guess is, Eunice will have a fishing rod in her hands for at least part of it.
