How the Badlands Became a Park

The process of protecting the Badlands as a national place took longer than most visitors might expect and came close to not happening at all. As early as nineteen oh nine, South Dakota boosters were lobbying for national park designation, but the Badlands presented a problem: the land had no marketable timber, no mineral wealth worth protecting, no water for irrigation, and no obvious recreational use that lawmakers in Washington could envision. Congress was accustomed to protecting mountains and forests and geysers.

The Badlands were strange. The decisive push came in the late nineteen twenties from South Dakota's congressional delegation working with the state's governor and local business interests who understood that federal designation would bring roads, infrastructure, and tourism. President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation authorizing a Badlands national monument in nineteen twenty-nine, but the boundaries were not fully set and land transfer was not completed until President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the national monument on January twenty-fifth, nineteen thirty-nine.

Some of the included land had already been acquired by the federal government as part of the New Deal buyout of failed homestead farms. The monument was redesignated Badlands National Park by Congress in nineteen seventy-eight, nearly forty years after the original proclamation. In nineteen seventy-six, before the redesignation, the Stronghold Unit was added from the Pine Ridge Reservation.

A park that took seventy years to reach its final form, passing through homestead failures, world wars, military occupation, and tribal negotiations, is not a simple story of conservation. It is a record of competing claims slowly and imperfectly resolved.