Rapid City: Gateway to the Hills

You are in Rapid City, South Dakota, a city of roughly eighty thousand people that has always been defined by what surrounds it. To the west, the Black Hills rise out of the plains, granite peaks cloaked in ponderosa pine, hiding gold creeks and ancient granite and a story that runs from the dawn of the universe to an unresolved federal court case about a billion dollars nobody will accept. To the east, the grasslands stretch toward the Badlands and the Missouri River, the great divide between the West and the plains that Lewis and Clark crossed in eighteen oh four heading upstream.

Rapid City was founded in eighteen seventy-six, the year the United States broke the Fort Laramie Treaty to chase gold into Lakota territory. It was a supply town from the beginning, a place where miners bought provisions, where railroads terminated and expanded, where the Black Hills economy was organized and taxed and shipped east. Railroads reached Rapid City in the late eighteen eighties, connecting it to markets and cementing its role as the commercial center of western South Dakota.

The city sits at the eastern edge of the hills, where the creek fans out onto the plain, which is why it flooded so catastrophically in nineteen seventy-two. It is also why it grew: the wide valley gave room for a grid city, for airport runways, for a military base with the geography to be a Cold War nuclear deterrent.

Rapid City is also what the tourism economy calls a gateway city. Three million people per year come through on their way to Mount Rushmore. Many fewer make it to the Crazy Horse Memorial, or to Wounded Knee, or to Pine Ridge. The Hills offer different things depending on which way you turn. The monuments are famous. The history is longer, and much of it is not yet settled.