RAPID CITY, SD — As we enter into the dusk of the month, the Stock Show behind us and spring ahead, the city turns to the second landmark event of February: the 150th anniversary of its founding.
Though Rapid may not have the edge on deadwood in terms of action-packed gunfights, or what we might picture when we see a town forged by the time of the wild west, the largest town for miles around still has a story. It is a story which intersects deeply with the success of the hills in its past and future, twines with some of the major events of American History, and has played host to one of the most deadly floods in history.
How did we get here? What made this city the central settlement in the hills, and what might make it reach those heights in the future?
John Brennan’s “Hay Camp”
(Left to right) John Brennan, Sam Scott, and Tom Ferguson, founders of Rapid City (Courtesy of the Journey Museum)
When you first look into Rapid City’s History, you’ll usually see it referred to as “Hay Camp”. While outsiders called it that, some of the earliest accounts of Rapid, namely the diary of Sam Scott, one of the settlers of the city refer to it as just that, the city centered around Rapid Creek – ergo, a “Rapid City”. Rapid City was founded in 1876 by a group headed by John Brennan, a former hotel owner and brief prospector from Denver. “You cannot identify a person who is so integral to founding Deadwood, you can’t really identify a person in Spearfish; In fact, three different contending groups kind of fought over establishing Spearfish, whereas with Rapid City, there’s John Brennan and his group,” said Dr. David A. Wolff, history professor emeritus at Black Hills State University and author of The Gateway to the Hills: Rapid City and the Central Black Hills.
“John Brennan, who led the group never thought of himself as a prospector, I don’t think,” said Wolff, “He saw how Denver flourished on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, how it became the Mecca for the mining business. When he came to the black hills like everybody else, the nation was suffering through the economic depression that started in 1873 and business was down in Denver, so he came up here to take a chance. He didn’t really last long in the gold field and he knew there were better ways to make a living, and he always wanted to be a town founder”. And quickly, Brennan focused on replicating Denver in the hills, building trails to it from Ft. Pierre and developing its economy to feed miners, travellers, and eventually to be a processing and trade hub for the area.
This can be credited as a significant reason for Rapid flourishing. During this time, every settlement had a rivalry to become the big city in the Hills, and while Rapid faced early ups and downs, nearly being abandoned early on due to a harsh winter and tarnished morale, the essential logistical need Rapid fed led to it becoming the center for everyone around it.
In simple terms: with a booming gold trade in the northern hills, the picks and pans had to come from somewhere. Rapid City had the roads, which would eventually evolve into rails around the turn of the century. By the turn of the century, Black Hills National Forest diminished logging efforts, setting a status quo for the city.
Someone Else’s Home
A city born in the throes of conflict with indigenous nations, built on the treaty land said nations were promised just eight years prior to the city’s founding, Rapid City and colonists in the Black Hills faced frequent early troubles stemming from the ongoing American Indian Wars. Though issues never went so far as open conflict between the settlers and surrounding Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow, scares were frequent – both real and imagined.
The city’s foundation occurred just four months prior to Custer’s death at Little Bighorn, and while many native groups stuck to trails in the southern Hills, others were emboldened by the strong victory at the battle. In the days following the victory, bands travelling back from the site targeted livestock primarily, leading to several deaths at the outskirts of Rapid. Having heard the news, many of the settlers fled and others built a stockade near modern downtown Rapid, anticipating open conflict to come. However, no conflict occurred after that.
These fears were stoked again in 1890 as the Black Hills feared retribution for the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which up to 300 were killed by federal forces after a forced migration and disarming of a native community. While fears existed of this relitigating active conflict, none occurred in Rapid.
While the civil and land rights of the Lakota people in the Black Hills remains a sore issue, leaving a wound which has not been bandaged, much less healed, records seem to indicate an uneasy, but relatively commonplace Lakota presence in the city as far back as the 1900s.
The Camp Becomes A City
The rail coming to Rapid was a landmark moment for the city. Isolated from major cities both now and then, the rail likely represented being just that much closer to the comforts of the world for settlers. With more able to go through Rapid City faster, Rapid’s centralized place became cemented. Wood and gold came in raw forms and were processed in the city, before being shipped out by rail to parts unknown.
During this time, the Crouch Line was an especially important facet which allowed Rapid City to be the gateway that it was. Though it was called the “Crookedest line in the world” in some accounts at the time, and was marred with several accidents by both the terrain the follies of early railway development, it was considered integral enough to the city that when the Rapid-to-Mystic line was threatened after its owner C.D. Crouch declared bankruptcy, banker James Halley II (the namesake of Halley Park) came in to save it, keeping it operating as freight, before becoming a tourist attraction which remained open until the 1940s. Halley and fellow banker R.C. Lake are credited with making donations which led to the further development of the city in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In 1910 Connecticut-born future-Mayor George Mansfield first electrified Rapid city when he founded the Dakota Power Company with collaborators John C. Haines, L. A. Russell and Judge Levi McGee. Mansfield would later promote the construction of Dinosaur park in the 1930s, seeing it completed in 1938, which followed a trend of the region turning from frontier boom and lumber to more tourist ends.
And of course, no discussion of tourism is complete without the center of it all. In 1927 the direction of the Hills was changed forever though when Gutson Borglum began the construction of Mt. Rushmore. Though the construction and Borglum are no strangers to controversy beyond the scope of this history, the project represented more of a “Trickle than a flood” to the local economy at first according to David Wolff, who recounted a story from his father in which people often predicted that the project would not be completed, and donation drives collecting nickels for Borglum were commonplace in school.
Much of the success of the project can be traced back to the key financial work of Rapid City’s John Boland, an implement dealer who author Rex Alan Smith called the “General Manager” of Mt. Rushmore, and who was willing to fight Borglum to keep finances in order.
The same year Borglum began his project, Calvin Coolidge visited the Hills during the first year of his presidency, abruptly moving his staff across the country to see the region.
Though in spite of this new, and occasionally strange growth, this was far from an ideal time for many. Though Sturgis acted as its center, Rapid played host to a surge of KKK activity in the 1920s, which mirrored trends of racialized and xenophobic violence across the country and primarily sought to target the area (particularly Leads’) significant catholic population – additionally targeting immigrants and black families in some cases. Though they paraded through the streets of towns including rapid, internal corruption, public opinion, and harsh media scrutiny led to a diminished membership in following decades, with the second “invisible empire” officially disbanded nationally in 1944.
Ellsworth
During WWII the US, following the great depression reawakened from Monroe-era isolation to find itself in a world on fire. A rapid era of industrialization followed, with the military expanding faster than it had, possibly since the Civil War. The nation needed more military might than it had ever fielded – tanks, trucks, and ships, but also troops and pilots to use them.
Rapid City was the perfect place to train new bomber pilots due to its proximity to flat land in the great plains and distance from potential conflict with real enemy aircraft, and so the Rapid City Airfield was founded to shepherd pilots to victory, like Major Jack Criswell, 1Lt. Godfrey Engel, and Ola Mildred Rexroat, the only native woman admitted to the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in WWII.
And as the world shifted, so did the Airfield. Renamed in honor of Brigadier General Richard E. Ellsworth in 1953 following his death, the AFB found a place training and housing B-36 and B-52 pilots throughout the Cold War. Following the end of the Cold War and the deactivation of Ellsworth’s 44th missile wing, 150 missile silos primarily containing Minuteman I & 2 ICBMs were deactivated throughout the 90s.
Due to this no longer critical purpose, the base was threatened with closure in 2005, however lobbying at the time prevented this. The base is considered strategically vital today, and is set to become the operational home of Northrop Grumman’s B-21 “Raider” Bombers in 2027.
The Flood
“I think Rapid City was relegated to sort of just kind of sitting on its laurels to an extent,” says Wolff, “I think that the flood really shook that in a lot of people’s minds”.
In 1972, Rapid City had entered an era of stagnancy. New growth had largely slowed and the government at the time was developmentally conservative to a fault. Dale Barnett was the recently-elected mayor, and was younger than his forebears.
Then the flood happened.
The National Severe Local Storm Forecast Center (Now Known as the Storm Prediction Center) advised the Black Hills of potential strong storms at 9am on June 9th, though this seems to have not been detected by local weather forecasting until Ellsworth’s weather radar detected the incoming system.
By 5pm, rains began, and reports of flooding by 6pm from county sheriff’s departments led to state radio dispatch requesting radio and tv stations warn motorists to avoid certain roadways. According to a story recorded by Corey Christianson, author of The 1972 Black Hills Flood, “Mayor Barnett actually was down at Canyon Lake, watched the water rise and rise and rise and rise, went and tried to open the pipes himself to get them even further open, and then he started going door to door and trying to get people out of their homes”.
By 6:30pm Rapid Creek was rising rapidly, and the National Weather Service warned of flash flooding nearly an hour later, around the time the mayor activated the national guard, police, sheriffs department, and highway patrol to aid civilians. At 7:45 a Nemo resident reports flooding upstream of Box Elder Creek and the NWS warning is expanded accordingly.
Around this time Keystone, which is built along Rapid Creek flooded, leading to eight fatalities. Sturgis flooded as well, which thankfully had no fatalities but caused massive property damage for local families.
During this, existing alarm systems were quickly made non-operational amid rising waters, which fragmented emergency communications. During this time as well, the NWS’s Rapid City Airport office became largely unresponsive as telecommunications was destroyed.
At 10:45 pm, Canyon Lake Dam fails, and a flood crest with an estimated flow rate of 50,000 Cubic Feet Per Second (over one billion gallons per hour) reached downtown by midnight. Rapid Creek reaches a maximum depth of nearly 16 feet, before receding by 5am.
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In the end, 238 people died in the flood. Thousands were displaced to relief camps and Ellsworth, and over $67 million dollars worth of damage (mostly to lower-income housing) racked Rapid with a pain it had not known before and has not known since.
The flood forced the city to change. Zoning was brought forward to ban development in floodplain areas to prevent future tragedy, and in 1975 Barnett saw through the construction of the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center (now The Monument) which sat before Memorial Park, a memorial to those lost to the flood.
The Future
When asked about his vision for the future in interview, Mayor Salamun spoke to the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the past in relation to Rapid City, “Rapid City is a special place we need to keep it that way, and that doesn’t just happen on its own. It takes the effort of all of us making this a community we love to live in. My vision for Rapid City is really simple. It sounds basic, but it’s foundational to everything we want to do: it is that we are a city where children thrive and families flourish. If that’s true, we will always have a bright future, when that isn’t true we will struggle in the future.”
In that same interview with Mayor Jason Salamun, he said that he was often inspired by stories of coordination in the defining time of the ‘72 Flood, in which citizens warning neighbors of the impending disaster, and housing each other in the following days, saying “We saw in 72 with the flood. We saw it in 2013, with winter storm Atlas. We saw it in December with the windstorm, that anytime we think we’re too big to come together as a community, we do”. Comparing them to community outreach the city has been involved in, in the present.
“I think that is one of those strengths of our community, the last 150 years, that When push comes to shove, you’ll agree on this issue or that issue. But The neighbors do help out the neighbors around here and I hope that never goes away.”
