A Little WAGON with a BIG Story

Photos and vivid memories were the only evidence brothers Lanny, Lee and Mel Schultz had that their great-uncle, John Helgen, had ever used a small wooden wagon owned by South Dakota’s Custer State Park.

In the late 1920s, John (an uncle to the Schultz brothers’ father) traveled from Plymouth County, Iowa, to western South Dakota to work at the park. “For several years, from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, he was a travel ambassador for Custer State Park,” Lanny says. “He took this wagon and a small buffalo calf to cities across South Dakota to promote the park. At some of the nearby