Wall: The Town at the Edge of Two Worlds
Near Wall, South Dakota
The town of Wall sits at the boundary of two completely different landscapes, and everything about it follows from that fact. To the north and east, the land is high shortgrass prairie, the rolling plains of the American West extending toward a flat horizon. To the south, the earth drops away into the Badlands, a jagged escarpment of eroded buttes and gullies falling steeply to the lower basin below.
This geological edge, where the high plains meet the carved formations, is the reason the town has the name it has. The Wall is the name locals have long given to the escarpment itself, and the town that grew up at its top took the name as its own. Wall began as a railroad stop in nineteen oh seven, when the Chicago and North Western Railway pushed its tracks west across the plains and established a water stop at a drainage leading toward the formations.
The town that grew around the depot was unremarkable at first: a grain elevator, a general store, a scattering of homesteaders on the surrounding quarter-sections. What was not unremarkable was the land. The settlers who arrived in the nineteen tens and early twenties were encouraged by federal policy and a run of unusually wet years to believe that this corner of South Dakota could be farmed like Iowa.
It could not. When the dry years of the nineteen thirties came, the crops failed, the plowed topsoil blew away in great dust clouds, and families packed their belongings and left. The land had made its terms plain.
Wall survived the collapse partly because of its position on the highway and partly because of the ingenuity of a pharmacist named Ted Hustead, whose small drugstore drew travelers with the promise of free ice water during the drought years, and whose roadside signs eventually became famous across the continent. But Wall's deeper story is not about signs. It is about a place where the Great Plains end, where geology performs one of its most dramatic transitions, and where a century of human ambition has had to make terms with land that does not bend to human plans.
