Belleville wagon in South Dakota museum

Q: We recently returned from a trip to South Dakota. While we were there, we visited the Days of ’76 Museum in Deadwood. I am sending you pictures of a wagon that was among a group of wagons and buggies on display. Painted on the wagon was “B. Bossler, Belleville, Il.” Could you find out how a wagon from Belleville ended up in Deadwood?

A: Besides his family, Bernard “Bernie” Bossler had at least two other passions in life, his widow, Susan, told me: old wagons and the badlands of South Dakota. Combine the two and it’s easy to understand how this brightly colored peddler’s wagon with his name on it came to greet you during your recent visit to Deadwood.

As a child, Bernie had watched his father, Otto, develop the family nursery on Hartman Lane near Belleville. In running that business, Otto began using Belgian mares as draft horses soon after starting his tree nursery in the 1920s.

“The horses can still go places a tractor can’t — like through mud,” Bernie, who died in 2005, explained to us once.

It must have left a deep impression on his young son. When Bernie took over the business in 1960, he not only kept and expanded the stable of animals, but he also started buying old-timey wagons for the horses to pull and enjoyed showing them off in parades.

“I remember one year he pulled the sleigh with Santa Claus in the Belleville parade,” Susan said.

But, she said, perhaps his favorite was the simple peddler’s wagon that drew your eye at the museum. According to records, it was built in 1906 by the St. Louis Iron and Store Co. After buying it in the 1980s, Bernie had it restored. You can credit the late local sign painter Dennis “Denny” Hamann for the attractive paint job with the decorations and lettering.

Once refurbished, it gave the family years of fun and memories as it never failed to delight the crowds at countless events, including the St. Clair County Bicentennial Parade in 1990.

“(Bernie) would buy bags of potatoes and all kinds of vegetables,” Susan recalled. “We’d put them in my baskets on the side of the wagon — you know, just like an old-time peddler’s wagon that used to go house to house. And he’d wear bib overalls and a hat. I even remember a couple of parades when my boys (Simon and Andrew) were in high school or maybe a little younger and they passed out oranges and apples instead of throwing candy. It was just the coolest thing.”

Over the years, the couple also developed a deep love for their own journeys to South Dakota.

“Bernie and I would go to Deadwood and the badlands four or five times a year,” said Susan, who still remembers being awestruck by the thunder and vibration of thousands of animals being herded together during the annual Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup. “It’s a little gambling town and the mountains ... you know, Mount Rushmore and just the whole area. It was nestled kind of down in the mountains. Sometimes we’d be snowed in, and that was so much fun.”

So it was inevitable that Bernie would be drawn to the Days of ’76 Museum in Deadwood like a cowboy to grub after a hard day on the range. It was named for the Days of ’76 Celebration, an annual ridin’ and ropin’ spectacular that started in 1924 and grew into a weeklong event that, for the past 15 years, has been the nation’s top mid-sized rodeo. Over the years, the museum began informally as simply a place to store all of the wagons, stagecoaches, carriages and other memorabilia used during the festivities. Later, collections of pioneer and Native American artifacts, archives and firearms were added. By the 1990s, it was recognized as holding the state’s largest collection of horse-drawn vehicles, which Bernie loved.

It was about this time, too, that Bernie retired from the nursery business, selling the land, his horses and many of his wagons. Still, he kept that peddler’s wagon until one day he announced, “You know, I think we’ll just take it out to that museum.” So in June 1999, they hauled their beloved cart up to Deadwood. After watching it roll through the Days of ’76 Parade, they agreed to loan it to the museum for five years. Now, 16 years later, visitors like you still can admire it. As the sign nearby says, it may come from Belleville but it still helps tell the Deadwood story.

“We’ve had friends who have gone out to see it,” Susan said. “Since Bernie passed away, I haven’t been. My boys kind of want to go out sometime, but haven’t done it.”

But she still does have the warm family memories of those days filled with horses and wagons. In her basement, which is decorated for Christmas year-round, you’ll find a sleigh used in a Sonja Henie movie. The couple found the sleigh at a Central Illinois shop. And, when her husband died 10 years ago this month, his obituary urged friends and family to make memorials “to Bernie’s passion — the Days of ’76 Museum.”

“We had big show wagons that he took to the state fair,” Susan said. “But that peddler’s wagon we just loved.”

Today’s trivia

What prospector, whose name we still hear regularly, discovered gold in 1880 in the Alaskan panhandle?

Answer to Monday’s trivia: Originally, we were in the market only for New Orleans. But on April 30, 1803, the United States signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, allowing the country to buy 828,000 square miles from Napoleon for less than 3 cents an acre. Today, 15 states have been carved from the huge tract: all of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska and parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Louisiana. Hard to imagine now why the Federalist Party would have fought perhaps the greatest international real estate bargain in history .

This story was originally published December 15, 2015 at 9:45 AM with the headline "Belleville wagon in South Dakota museum."