Black Hills National Cemetery

Just south of Sturgis, at the base of the Black Hills, lies a cemetery that holds more than twenty-nine thousand American veterans, and carries within its soil the full arc of the United States military from the Indian Wars through the wars of the twenty-first century.

The land here was military ground long before a single grave was dug. Fort Meade was established in eighteen seventy-eight by the surviving troops of the Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment that had ridden with George Armstrong Custer two years earlier at the Little Big Horn. The fort's mission was to keep an uneasy peace between Lakota and Cheyenne peoples and the flood of prospectors who had poured into the Black Hills after gold was discovered in eighteen seventy-four. A small post cemetery opened that same year on the fort grounds, and its earliest interments were soldiers who had fallen in campaigns across the northern plains.

For seven decades the fort cemetery remained a modest burial ground. Then, in nineteen forty-eight, the federal government formally established Black Hills National Cemetery on the adjacent land, near the old fort burial ground, which became Fort Meade National Cemetery, and opening it to veterans from across the nation. It remains the only national cemetery in South Dakota accepting new interments.

The cemetery holds some remarkable figures. Charles Windolph, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Little Big Horn in eighteen seventy-six, is buried here. So are Buffalo Soldiers, the Black regiment members who served on the frontier after the Civil War. No other national cemetery in the country contains quite this layering: Indian War era Medal of Honor recipients interring alongside veterans of Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, all on ground that was itself once contested between the United States Army and the nations whose land this was.

The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in twenty sixteen. When you drive past its rows of white stones set against the ponderosa pine slopes, you are looking at a compressed history of American expansion and its costs, in every direction.