Ben Millard came to the Badlands on bank business and stayed to build at Cedar Pass. Boone tells how one businessman fought over where this road would run, and the job that later had him buying land from his own neighbors for the government.
Ben Millard came to this country to bury a bank. He worked for the state, winding up banks that had gone under, and the one he came for, the park's big study says, was the Bank of Interior. He got a look at the Badlands, heard talk of a park, and started hunting for a place to build. Senator Norbeck, the man pushing that park, had a daughter married to Millard's nephew, and in the fall of nineteen twenty-seven the two men scouted sites together. Then Millard went to lease government land and ran straight into President Harding's order of nineteen twenty-two, made for Norbeck's own park, that had closed it. So his sister, Clara Jennings, bought private ground on the flat at the foot of Cedar Pass, and as far as the record shows the deed stayed hers until nineteen thirty-seven. If you were young in Rapid City in the late twenties you might have driven out to his dance hall to hear Lawrence Welk. The state wanted its road the cheap way, clear of the Wall, and Millard held that scenery was the whole reason for a road, so in nineteen thirty-one he and his man Curley Nelson staked a line of their own, close along the cliffs, and he talked the state around, and that's why you're on this road. Come September of nineteen thirty-four, with the farms failing all around him and the government wanting a local man to buy up land for what became the monument, who do you suppose they hired? Ben Millard. The government bought from those willing to sell, and you may want to know what willing looked like. A year in, the average offer was two dollars and eighty-five cents an acre, and Senator Norbeck wrote that on much of that land "the price offered is less than the taxes held against the land." They held meetings to protest the price. Those were his neighbors. The Park Service slated his cabins for demolition, and you might think that would do it, but they stood, and he kept giving land, one parcel of it the ground that made the road at the Northeast Entrance possible. He died at his lodge in March of nineteen fifty-six, at eighty-three. In June of fifty-seven they named a stretch of the Wall for him, Millard Ridge. Six-tenths of a mile, for a man whose line you've been driving for miles.
Photo: Renee Bieretz, Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS SD-25-10 (CT), Library of Congress, public domain · Public domain