THE BADLANDS, WALL, SD July 3rd and 4th

We stayed the night at Wall, SD, where it is famous for the Wall Drugstore. That was kind of a disappointment as it’s renovated and just another tourist souvenir store. We stopped in a saloon for our afternoon beer.

The next day we did a loop through the Badlands. They are an amazing land formation. We first stopped at the Brown homesteading cabin.  (Somehow we missed the missile silo site). The Brown family homesteaded here 160 acres in 1909. The house was into the hill with buffalo grass sod bricks one of the construction materials along with Cottonwood logs. The floor was hard clay and they had added a lot of artifacts, a few originals from the Brown family and the rest ones that sodbusters like them might have owned. An old Singer treadle sewing machine, like the one Grandma Mitchell taught me to sew on, was there. A wooden deserted claim shack was added on for the living room later. The cave and chicken house were dug into the bank. The cave served as a refrigerator in summer and a place that food and milk would not freeze in winter.

Usually a homestead had a plow and maybe one or two other pieces of machinery, that they shared with each other. Prairie dogs (we stopped earlier at a prairie dog town and

fed them peanuts! Very cute!) , a rodent related to ground squirrels, must have made Mrs. Brown’s gardening efforts difficult.

This area was one of the last to be homesteaded as western SD was set aside as Indian reservation. The Homestead Act required that 5 acres be plowed into crops. Another requirement was living on the land for 18 months and then paying $.50/acre, or $80, for a patent on the homestead. This the Brown’s did. Most, including this family, had a hard time surviving poverty. It has been determined that 160 acres like this would only sustain eight cows.

Edgar Brown was born in Iowa in 1854 and died there at the Prairie Homestead in 1920. His wife moved later to California with a daughter and died in 1943. Another farmer rented it from the son, Charles, until 1949 when he moved away.  Very interesting site to visit and it gave you an appreciation for the difficulties of life here.

We drove  next through the Badlands, a very formidable and weird landscape, caused by water and wind erosion. Not very hospitable for farming, which is why they probably gave it to the Indians to live in! Until they took even that!!

While we were viewing one of these sites