The Rapid City Journal and the City's Newspapers
A town announces itself in print. Before Rapid City had paved streets or a courthouse worth the name, it had men setting type by hand, turning out sheets full of mining news, freight notices, political quarrels, and advertisements for the goods a frontier settlement needed. The newspapers came early because a community that meant to last wanted a record of itself and a way to talk to the wider world. What that early press wrote, and what later papers carried, forms one of the better accounts we have of how the place grew.
The first papers in the Black Hills appeared in the gold camps to the north, in Deadwood and the surrounding diggings, where the money and the excitement were thickest in the late 1870s. Rapid City, founded in 1876 as a supply town rather than a mining camp, took its own first steps into journalism not far behind. Small weeklies came and went in those years, as they did everywhere on the frontier. Printing was cheap to start and hard to sustain. An editor might launch a paper with a borrowed press and a stock of optimism, run it for a season or two, and then fold, sell out, or merge with a rival when the subscriptions and advertising failed to cover the cost of paper and ink.
A daily takes hold
Out of that churn a more durable institution emerged. The paper that became known as the Rapid City Journal established itself as the town’s daily of record, and over the long run it outlasted its competitors and absorbed several of them. A growing town could support a daily where it could not support three or four struggling weeklies, and as Rapid City pulled ahead of its early rivals to become the trade center for the whole region, its newspaper grew with it.
For most of the twentieth century the Journal was where western South Dakota learned what had happened. It reported the arrival of the railroad and the early industries that fed the town, the founding of the South Dakota School of Mines, the building of the air base east of town, and the long Cold War years that followed. It covered the routine business of a county seat, the courthouse cases and the city council meetings, the prices ranchers got for cattle, the scores from the high school games. A run of back issues, preserved on microfilm and increasingly online, is one of the first places a historian looks when trying to fix a date or settle a question about the city’s past.
The paper’s most demanding hours came in June 1972, when the flood tore through the heart of the city in a single night and killed more than two hundred people. A newspaper exists, in part, for moments like that, when a stricken community needs reliable information more than anything else: who was missing, where to find shelter, which roads were gone, what help was coming. The Journal’s coverage of the disaster and the long recovery that followed stands among the most important work it ever did.
Newspapers everywhere have had a difficult time in recent decades. The arrival of the internet pulled away the classified advertising that once paid much of the bill, readers shifted to screens, and ownership of many papers passed from local families to large chains that bought titles across the country. The Rapid City Journal followed that broader pattern, with consolidations, staff reductions, and the steady pressures that have thinned newsrooms throughout the trade. The print edition grew lighter, and much of the reporting moved online.
Whatever its present circumstances, the paper leaves behind a long shelf of bound and filmed volumes that amount to a daily diary of the city. The frontier weeklies that preceded it, scrappy and short-lived as most of them were, left fragments of the same kind. Read together, decade by decade, they show a settlement arguing with itself, boosting its prospects, mourning its dead, and writing down the ordinary days that no one thought to remember any other way. The history of a town is partly the history of who bothered to write it down, and in Rapid City the people who did that work mostly worked in a newspaper office.