Running shine in county

The late Norm Emily was without a doubt Brookings County’s most prolific bootlegger. I wrote about him in my book about South Dakota’s prohibition days when white mule, red-eye and barbed wire, jargon for booze, were illegal to make, transport or sell.

The illegal booze business model included the bootleggers who transported it and the moonshiners who made it.

Emily farmed near Lake Campbell. He became famous in town as a cattle feeder, but he wasn’t the only busy bootlegger around in the 1920s and early 1930s. They seemed to be everywhere.

There was Ira Dawson of Flandreau, who had customers in Brookings County. Dawson departed this world with a bad case of lead poisoning in 1928, shot twice in the stomach as he charged out the door of a home in White, intent on doing harm to a couple of young state deputy sheriffs, both Brookings lads, Lon Minier and Paul Merschon.
Merschon later became the Brookings County’s Democratic Party chairman and farmed near where the Teen Challenge of the Dakotas Center is today, west of the cemetery. Merschon and Minier were in pursuit of Dawson when the gunfight erupted.

Emily, like Dawson, kept a gun handy, but managed to survive his brush with law and was either lucky or hired the best Sioux Falls lawyers booze money could buy, or both. He usually avoided jail even when the evidence seemed preponderant.

After each of his numerous arrests, pettifogging barristers knitted obscure or imaginative legal pockets into which he could crawl. Emily’s friends also came forward to attest to his good character.

But the law finally caught up with Emily. A federal agent posing as a rube stopped by Emily’s farm near Lake Campbell to buy some stagger-foot. But Emily hadn’t just fallen off a hayrack in a hailstorm. He could smell the law a mile away.

He ordered the agent off the place. As the agent in his government car careened down the driveway, Emily fired off a few rounds, and then the thrill of the chase got the best of him. He jumped in his car and followed the agent.

His car spewed dust and gravel as he turned out onto the main road and soon came upon a posse of Brookings and Moody County deputy sheriffs manning a previously planned roadblock. As he drove by, he rolled down the car window, stuck out his shotgun and blazed away. No one was hurt.

He turned his car around and made another pass at the lawmen, then decided to hightail it out of there. But he soon came upon Brookings County Sheriff John Lunden at another roadblock. Lunden tried to wave Emily down.

Emily’s blood was running on high and his brain was in neutral. He floored it, zipping past Lunden quick as a hog on ice. The sheriff fired six shots, hoping to hit a tire. He didn’t.
Emily continued for a mile or two east of Lake Campbell and then abandoned his car and ran for the thick brush along the Big Sioux River.

The law found Emily’s car, radiator steaming and tires buried in the mud of a soggy ditch. Inside were two bottles containing traces of alcohol.

But Emily just disappeared. It was weeks before he was finally apprehended. An officious judge wearing a black robe smelling of cigars at the Brookings County Courthouse sent him to the state pen.

In the annals of Brookings County when South Dakota’s more strict bone- dry prohibition laws were superimposed atop federal laws from 1917 to 1935, Emily was one of the poster boys.