Ranching on the Western Dakota Prairie
East and south of the Black Hills, the timber gives way to open grassland that rolls toward the Missouri River. This is short-grass prairie, dry and wind-swept, poor for the plow but well suited to grazing animals. For thousands of years it carried great herds of bison. After the bison were gone and the Lakota had been confined to reservations, cattle took their place, and the country around Rapid City became ranching country.
The cattle came north and west in the years after the gold rush, often driven up from Texas along the trails or shipped in as the railroads pushed across the plains. The grass was free or nearly so on the open range, and a man with a brand and some luck could build a herd quickly. The early years of open-range ranching were a gamble against weather and price, and many lost the bet. Hard winters could kill cattle by the thousands, and the savage storms of the late 1880s taught a generation of ranchers that the northern plains were not Texas.
Fences, homesteads, and smaller outfits
The open range did not last. Barbed wire, homestead claims, and the steady arrival of settlers cut the great unfenced grasslands into ranches with boundaries. Many of the largest early outfits gave way to smaller family operations that ran cattle and, increasingly, sheep. The work settled into a pattern that would hold for generations: calving in spring, branding, summer grazing on the range, haying to carry the stock through winter, and the fall shipment of animals to market.
That last step bound the prairie to Rapid City. A ranch is only as good as its access to a market, and Rapid City became the place where western Dakota stock was gathered, sold, and shipped. Stockyards and sale facilities grew up around the rail lines, and ranchers came to town to do business, buy supplies, and ship their cattle east to the packing centers. The city’s role as a trade hub, which it had built first on mining and supply, extended naturally to the cattle and sheep of the surrounding plains.
A town and its hinterland
It is easy to think of Rapid City in terms of the Black Hills, the gold, the carved mountain, and the tourists. But the city has always faced two directions. To the west lie the Hills, and to the east lies the ranch country, and the town served both. The annual rhythm of the ranches filled its hotels and stores at shipping time, and the agricultural economy gave the area a base that did not depend on ore or scenery.
The connection showed up in the city’s civic life as well. The Central States Fair, which I describe in its own history, grew partly out of the need for a place where the region’s stock growers and farmers could show animals, compare breeding, and gather. Rodeo, which dramatized the everyday skills of the working ranch, became a fixture of such events and of the wider Black Hills calendar.
Living with the land
Ranching on this prairie has never been easy, and the people who do it tend to know it. The land is dry, and a string of poor years can break an outfit. Blizzards remain a genuine danger to livestock, as the great storm of 1949 made brutally clear across the region, a disaster I treat in the account of that winter. Drought is the other constant worry. Ranchers learned to stock conservatively, to put up hay against the bad winters, and to read the sky.
For all its hardships, ranching has shaped the character of western South Dakota as much as any industry. It filled the country around the Hills with families who measured wealth in cattle and grass, and it kept Rapid City tied to the working land that surrounds it. The Hills draw the visitors. The prairie, quietly, has done much of the long work of holding the region together.