Carrie Ingalls

The Ingalls girl who did not write the books spent most of her adult life in the Black Hills, in the newspaper trade. Caroline Celestia Ingalls, born in Kansas in 1870 and raised at De Smet, worked fifteen years for the De Smet News and Leader before going to work for Edward Senn, a publisher who owned something like fifty South Dakota papers and was known as the proof king. She came to Keystone in 1911 to manage The Recorder there and the Hill City Star. She arrived at forty one, already a landowner, having proved up a homestead of her own north of Philip on the open range east of the hills. In Keystone she met David Swanzey, a mine owner and a widower with two children. They married on 1 August 1912, honeymooned at Hot Springs, and she left the newspapers to raise his two children, Mary and Harold. When her mother died in 1924 she took in her blind sister Mary as well. She raised money door to door to keep the Keystone church open and let the fire department build on her land. She died at Rapid City in 1946 and was buried with her family at De Smet. Keystone remembers Swanzey as having had a hand in naming Mount Rushmore, a claim that is repeated in several incompatible forms and that no primary record has been found for.