Grand River National Grassland: Sitting Bull Country and the Land Between the Reservations

The Grand River runs east through the high plains of northwestern South Dakota, cutting a shallow valley through short-grass prairie and badlands buttes on its way to the Missouri. Sitting Bull's cabin stood on the Grand River. This is where he was killed on the morning of December fifteenth, eighteen ninety, by Indian police sent to arrest him, fourteen days before Wounded Knee. The site is a few miles north of the grassland boundary, on the Standing Rock Reservation.

The Grand River National Grassland sits between the Standing Rock Reservation to the north and the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation to the south. It occupies land that was homesteaded beginning in the nineteen teens, broken and planted, and then abandoned or sold back to the federal government when the Dust Bowl defeated the farming economy that had replaced the Lakota economy the reservations had already defeated.

The Bankhead-Jones Act of nineteen thirty-seven funded those purchases. Roughly one hundred sixty thousand acres in this corner of South Dakota passed back to federal ownership and were designated for managed grazing. The federal government leases most of it to ranchers. The grass has been recovering for nearly ninety years.

What the grassland designation does not resolve is the underlying legal question. This land was part of the Great Sioux Reservation established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. It was broken up and opened to homesteaders after the Dawes Act of eighteen eighty-seven dismantled communal land tenure. The homesteaders failed. The government bought it back. The Lakota nations whose treaty guaranteed this land in perpetuity are still on the reservations to the north and south of it.

The grassland is managed jointly by the Forest Service and the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes under consultation agreements. The grass does not know any of this.