The North Unit: Bombs in the Badlands

The southern portion of Badlands National Park, called the Stronghold Unit, has a history that the landscape does not announce but that the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation have not forgotten. During World War Two, the United States Army Air Forces needed large tracts of remote land for training purposes. In nineteen forty-two, federal authorities leased approximately three hundred forty thousand acres of Pine Ridge Reservation land from the Oglala Sioux Tribe, displaced the Lakota families who had been living there, and established the Badlands Bombing and Gunnery Range.

For more than two decades, military aircraft flew over the formations and dropped practice bombs, fired machine guns, and strafed targets on the ancient sedimentary terrain. The lease payments were considered inadequate by the tribal government. Displacement of the Lakota families who lost their homes and grazing land was never fully compensated.

The bombing stopped in the nineteen sixties, but the unexploded ordnance scattered through the area did not disappear with the military. When Congress transferred the Stronghold Unit to the National Park Service in nineteen seventy-six, it was a negotiated compromise in which the Oglala Sioux Tribe retained jurisdiction in a joint management arrangement. Certain zones within the unit remain closed to visitors today because of unexploded ordnance that has never been fully documented or removed.

The Stronghold Unit is the wildest and least visited part of the park. It also contains the Stronghold Table, a high plateau where Lakota gathered during the Ghost Dance movement of eighteen ninety, believing the plateau's edges would protect them. The land carries many layers.