The Cold War Boom: Rapid City Grows Around Ellsworth
For most of its first seventy years, Rapid City was a modest place, a supply and trade town serving the mines, ranches, and timber of the Black Hills and the surrounding prairie. What turned it into the second-largest city in South Dakota, and tied its fortunes to decisions made in Washington and Moscow, was the long standoff that followed the Second World War. The Cold War came to western South Dakota in the form of an air base and a field of buried missiles, and the city grew up around them.
The airfield east of town had been built during the war as the Rapid City Army Air Base, a training ground for bomber crews. When the fighting ended, many such bases across the country were closed and forgotten. This one survived. The reorganization of American air power and the rising tension with the Soviet Union gave the field a new and permanent purpose under the Strategic Air Command, the arm of the Air Force charged with the nation’s long-range nuclear deterrent. In the early 1950s the installation was renamed Ellsworth Air Force Base, in honor of a base commander killed in a crash, and it became a fixed feature of the Cold War order.
Bombers, then missiles
The early years brought the great bombers of the period, enormous aircraft that needed long runways, large crews, and a substantial support establishment. Thousands of airmen and their families arrived to fly and maintain them, and to staff the base that kept them ready around the clock. A base of that size was, in effect, a small city set down on the prairie, and the real city next door felt the change at once.
The mission grew heavier in the 1960s with the arrival of the intercontinental ballistic missile. Across a vast stretch of ranchland in western South Dakota, the government planted underground silos holding Minuteman missiles, monitored from launch control centers buried out among the cattle. Ellsworth ran the operation. The missile fields spread the base’s footprint over thousands of square miles, and they bound the regional economy still more tightly to the work of nuclear deterrence.
A city remade
The effect on Rapid City was profound. The base became one of the largest employers in the state, and the steady inflow of military pay, construction contracts, and federal spending supported a wide circle of local business. New neighborhoods went up to house service families. Schools expanded. The retail district grew to serve a population that had jumped well beyond what the old trade economy alone could have sustained. Airmen who finished their service often stayed, having come to like the country, and they added their skills and savings to the town.
This prosperity carried an undertone that residents understood plainly. The same features that brought the money also made the area a target. In the grim arithmetic of the era, a base full of bombers and a landscape studded with missiles were precisely the kind of place an enemy would aim for first. People lived with that knowledge in a matter-of-fact way, the way coastal towns live with the threat of storms.
The boom was not without anxiety of another kind either. A military town’s economy rises and falls with decisions made far away, and Rapid City would later face real fear when base closures were considered in periods of defense cutbacks. Each such scare reminded the city how much of its livelihood rested on a single federal installation. The base endured, its role shifting with the times, but the lesson stuck.
By the time the Cold War wound down, the change was permanent. The trade town of the 1930s had become a regional hub with a diversified economy, a larger population, and an enduring connection to the Air Force. The bombers and missiles had done more than guard the country. They had built a city, and the shape they gave it remains.