In 1942, with the country at war and pilots to train, the War Department went looking for empty ground where gunners could practice, and settled on the northern edge of the Pine Ridge Reservation, among the badlands below the Stronghold. It was not empty. Some 125 Oglala families ranched and farmed there, and the government took the land anyway, 341,726 acres of it, by purchase and lease under the power of eminent domain, along with a small piece of what was then Badlands National Monument.
Before winter
The families were told to leave before the winter of 1942. The payments came in installments and were too small to buy land elsewhere, and many of those uprooted ended up in the poorer neighborhoods of Rapid City. Among them was Dewey Beard, Wasú Máza, Iron Hail, a Mnicoujou Lakota who had fought at the Little Bighorn as a teenager and survived the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. He and his wife Alice had been raising horses on their land on Pine Ridge. He was in his eighties when the army moved him off it. When he died in 1955 he was the last known Lakota survivor of both.
The range
Through the war, planes flew air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery practice over the tables and gullies, and bombs and shells fell across most of what is now the South Unit of Badlands National Park. After the war the South Dakota National Guard used part of the range for artillery. In 1968 the Air Force declared most of it surplus, and the land came back over the following years, much of it to the tribe and its members. Only a fraction of the families who had been moved ever returned.
The Stronghold
The most rugged part, around Stronghold Table where the Ghost Dancers gathered in 1890, became the park's South Unit under a 1976 agreement between the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the National Park Service, and the two have managed it together since, with the tribe pressing for more of a say. The Air Force kept 2,486 acres too thick with unexploded ordnance to hand back, and has worked with the tribe to clear and manage them.
Shell casings and scraps of metal still turn up across the South Unit, and the park warns visitors not to touch anything that looks like ordnance and to report it instead. The road to the White River Visitor Center crosses ground that was a target range within living memory. Forty-five miles south, the hill at Wounded Knee holds the mass grave of 1890, which Dewey Beard lived through.