Congress paid for a boarding school on the west edge of Rapid City in 1898, and the first students arrived that year. By 1907 the school held 1,391 acres, about two square miles, because industrial education meant the pupils worked a farm and a dairy after class. More than eight in ten came from Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River. Enrolment passed three hundred through the 1920s. At least forty children died there, of tuberculosis, meningitis, work accidents and causes never written down, a number later research has put nearer fifty, and some were buried on the grounds in graves their families were never told about. Tuberculosis closed the school in 1929. It reopened briefly and shut for good in 1933, after which the campus became a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and then a segregated tuberculosis hospital for Native patients. The land is the unfinished part. Public Law 543, passed on 20 May 1948, let the Interior Secretary hand the surplus school farm to Rapid City, to school districts and to the National Guard without payment, and it also authorised using the land for the rehabilitation of needy Indians. None of the twelve hundred acres that changed hands went to that last purpose. The Act carried a clause returning title to the United States if land stopped being used for the purpose it was given for, and that clause is the spine of a claim Native families have pressed for sixty years. The city council acknowledged the history in a resolution in November 2020.
Getting there
44.0744, -103.2717
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
