The other day I heard President Trump mentioned Al Capone.

And while skimming through the Rapid City Journal, my eye caught a headline saying something about the “Vatican to take up Black ...”   

By then I’d gone on to another page, but my brain caught up and I threw things in reverse to re-check that partially read Vatican headline. It was about the Pope and Sioux holy man Black Elk.

To segue to Capone, Black Elk and the Vatican, we need to go back a few years.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, before the first chunk of granite was blasted off Slaughter Mountain that became Mount Rushmore, the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce was desperate for national mention and notice. 

Then, most Americans had never heard of the Black Hills. They would never think of vacationing “way out there.” Folks in the Hills felt ignored, abandoned and isolated. No one was paying attention to that little place in the sun.

Of course, a few North Dakotans did drive down to do some bullhead fishing, or sit in the shade of an actual tree, but other than that, the Black Hills tourist business remained stuck in the mud.

So to help change the traveling public’s mind, especially in the tourist-rich Chicago area but also the national market, the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce fabricated wild and ridiculous ideas in the hopes of catching the national media’s eye. 

One of those ludicrous ideas was to invite the Pope to move the Vatican to the Black Hills. In the letter the Chamber extolled the beauty of the Hills and pointed out an available spot among the pines where the new Vatican dig could be sited. 

The Black Hills got some national and international press, but not the Vatican. 

So on my second reading of the recent headline announcing “Vatican to take up Black Elk cause,” I learned the Vatican wasn’t reconsidering moving, but was taking up again the canonizing of Nicholas Black Hawk, who was at the Battle of Little Big Horn and a Lakota holy man turned Catholic.

In October 1941, as the finishing touches were made to Mt. Rushmore, an attraction incidentally that turned around the lack of Black Hills tourism, it hired a parachutist, young George Hopkins, to jump out of an airplane onto Devil’s Tower.

On that one, the business group got more bang for its buck than it ever imagined. The parachutist hit his Devil’s Tower mark, but what followed became a big, newsworthy problem that people around the world followed for days.    

The rope thrown from the airplane to be used for George to lower himself to the ground became so entangled the parachutist was unable to string it out into a useful conveyance.

So for days Hopkins scrambled around up there on his one-acre prison chasing down sandwiches and water jugs dropped to him for sustenance. The international press followed the predicament hourly. Finally rock climbers from Wisconsin came to the rescue.

While most folks snickered at the creative attempts by Hills enthusiasts to get national attention, it was an ill-advised invitation to mobster Scarface Capone that finally got them into hot water. They invited Al Capone and his gang of thieves to move operations from Chicago to the Black Hills.

South Dakota Gov. William J. Bulow was not amused. 

He promptly disinvited Scarface and was joined by other South Dakotans in chastising Rapid City for inviting a thug and his mob to paradise.

Scarface didn’t accept the invitation. He later ended up in Alcatraz, which I suppose beats spending time in North Dakota.   

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