Black Kettle National Grassland

The grassland takes its name from the Southern Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, killed when Custer's Seventh Cavalry attacked his camp on the Washita in November 1868. The country around it became part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation and was opened to white settlement in 1892. Farmers grew good crops until the 1930s, when drought, wind and poor conservation stripped the topsoil in one of the regions hardest hit by the Dust Bowl, and many left.

Between 1937 and 1942, with the approval of Congress, the federal government bought up the failed farms. From 1938 the Soil Conservation Service replanted them with big bluestem, Indiangrass, side oats grama and buffalo grass, and quail, deer, turkey and doves came back. The Forest Service took over in 1953, and in June 1960 the land was designated a national grassland. In 1996 Representative Frank Lucas suggested selling it to pay for a memorial at the Washita, which set off a heated debate. The land stayed federal.

Of its 31,300 acres, 30,724 lie in Roger Mills County, in about a hundred tracts among private ranches, managed by the Cibola National Forest. Ranchers graze about 2,000 cattle a year on a rest-rotation system, oil and gas are produced, and grazing and mineral fees go back to the counties in place of taxes. Skipout Lake and Spring Creek Lake have campgrounds open year round. The Black Kettle Interpretive Trail starts at the district office, which shares a building with the Washita Battlefield visitor center on Highway 47A.