The Forgotten Lawmen Part 3: A Collection of Short Stories by a South Dakota Game Warden

By D.B. McCrea

Warden McCrea spent 23 years faithfully serving the citizens of South Dakota as a state game warden. His career, which spanned from 1983-2006, started in the Moody County Warden District in the small town of Flandreau. What made the Moody County Warden District so challenging is that prior to Warden McCrea's arrival, the district had been without a game warden for 25 years. His first serious challenge was overcoming the many vicious rumors started by poachers desperate to see Warden McCrea fail. The rumors made it far more difficult for Warden McCrea to be accepted by the community. Through hard work and an unrelenting determination to succeed, and after identifying and dealing with the person most responsible for spreading the rumors, Warden McCrea is eventually able to win their trust and respect. The poachers paid a heavy price from that point on. The days of poaching with relative impunity were over. After serving seven years in Flandreau, Warden McCrea transfers to the Minnehaha County Warden District in Sioux Falls, the most dangerous district in the state. Officer McCrea writes of his unique experiences and dangerous encounters in his series of books entitled The Forgotten Lawmen. In his first book, Warden McCrea writes of his time in Moody County. In his second book, Warden McCrea writes of his time in Minnehaha County. The Forgotten Lawmen Part 3 is a collection of short stories that take the reader even deeper into his experiences as a young state game warden. He returns to his roots and describes in graphic detail some of his most memorable, often unorthodox adventures working the Moody County Warden District.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543921588

Book preview

© D.B. McCrea, 2018

Print ISBN: 978-1-54392-157-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54392-158-8

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

To Pat, for his support and unwavering friendship; to Craig, for his support and spiritual guidance; to Bruce, my longtime friend and trusted advisor; to the men and women of the South Dakota Highway Patrol, for their courage and professionalism; and to the amazing and brilliant and beautiful Diane, for her confidence in me from the beginning.

A game warden can be smart, capable, hard-working, dependable, self-motivated, honest, and goal-oriented and still lack one critical trait, which, incidentally, happens to be the most important: professionalism.

Most of the game warden districts in South Dakota encompass large rural areas with relatively small populations. These districts aren’t anything like the Sioux Falls and Rapid City districts where an officer largely benefits from a high degree of anonymity. A game warden assigned to a district such as Faith or Martin or Flandreau can have their reputations besmirched by local gossip mongers in as little as five minutes and the one and only thing that protects the officer and his reputation is true and uncompromising professionalism.

Professionalism is defined as "the skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well." It includes taking personal responsibility for one’s actions. It means admitting one’s mistakes and possessing the genuine courage to apologize. It means every officer should make a determined effort to foster a sense of good will with supervisors, fellow game wardens, and others who fall collectively under the wide umbrella of the law enforcement team.

By law enforcement team I’m referring also to the judges, the state’s attorney, the court reporter, the clerk of courts, the deputy clerk of courts, dispatchers, and every badge-toter in the county, up to and including the sheriff and chief of police.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I heard a fellow law enforcement officer complain how so-and-so in the community was talking behind his back as the officer was doing the very same thing to a member of the law enforcement team!

This blatant hypocrisy wasn’t a one-time occurrence. The same officers did the same thing repeatedly with little or no regard for the consequences, consequences that were denigrating to the intended target and injurious to the all-important cohesiveness of the law enforcement team.

Refusing to understand or abide by this critically important precept will lead an officer down the wide path of destruction known as professional failure. Professional failure is the point of no return. Once an officer reaches professional failure there’s no turning back. The damage is almost always permanent and irreparable.

The best way to explain what I mean is by putting my advice and years of personal observations in the simplest terms possible: the most important, most effective thing an officer can do to avoid falling into the abyss of professional failure is by keeping his mouth shut.

By all means avoid bad-mouthing others and never, ever get embroiled in the ugliness and folly of local politics. In other words, stay neutral and don’t pick sides.

During my career I saw more officers from a variety of law enforcement agencies implode their professionalism by failing to heed this simple advice. The damage they caused may have been self-inflicted, but the damage went much deeper than the professional self-interests of the officers who couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

The Chief Deputy of Moody County was one of the worst examples. He enjoyed sowing discord among the law enforcement team, and damn if he wasn’t good at it. In my case, he told dispatch to call me on every car-deer accident regardless of time of day or night because picking up roadkill deer is all game wardens do.

His work direction to dispatch was intentionally mean and terribly irresponsible. Responding to every car-deer accident in the county twenty-four hours a day would have likely killed me. I would have done nothing but pick up dead deer with little or no time to eat, sleep, or perform my many other duties as a game warden. I told the dispatchers to ignore his foolish work direction. He wasn’t my boss.

He pulled the same shenanigans with the state trooper. We’re not handling calls on the interstate, he repeated ad nauseam. That’s the trooper’s job. His logic was confounding to say the least. The last time I checked, Interstate 29 ran through a portion of Moody County. Neither the chief deputy’s job description nor his badge and uniform patch read Moody County, except for the interstate. It would have greatly benefited the chief deputy to have kept his mouth shut.

Flandreau is a small town where gossip of any kind quickly spreads. It would take at most just one or two work days before the recipient of the backstabbing gossip knew what was said and by whom. Deriding someone as weak and worthless or having greasy t*ts weren’t particularly helpful in establishing trust and esprit de corps among members of the law enforcement team.

Attacking the local magistrate judge was especially self-defeating. Loudmouth officers belittling the judge on Monday were sitting next to the judge testifying about a