RAPID CITY— On the morning of June 9, 1972, the people of Rapid City awoke to an azure blue sky, a picture perfect Spring morning, birds were singing, children were playing, the sweet scent of Black Hills ponderosa pine drifted right down into the heart of downtown Rapid City. It was a great day to be alive, and if you were a teenager, hanging out in North Rapid with your friends, the day had endless possibilities for fun.
By nine A.M. the idyllic spring morning started to turn strange, in a way which 20/20 hindsight now screams for those who lived through that time to deem portentous. Something just wasn’t quite right. A breed Lakota teenager cut his hand mowing the lawn, had to go to the Sioux San and get nine stitches to close the gash. His friend felt guilty for having caused the hand injury, so he had his injured friend spend the night, and other friends dropped by, and they all stayed up late playing board games. None of them had any inkling of what was to come.
Outside, the weather had changed—a dark, ominous bank of angry rain clouds rolled down off the Black Hills over Rapid City, turning broad daylight into dusk. The top of the clouds towered beyond the range of the human eye to calculate, and the humidity skyrocketed to levels that would have shamed even Chamberlain.
The injured breed Lakota boy’s older brother was driving his girlfriend home, east from Baken Park, in his slapped-together Ford Falcon, when the earthen dam at Canyon Lake, about a half mile to the west of him, torn asunder, in a roar of earth and water West Rapid has never heard before or since. Canyon Lake Park was obliterated, and the neighborhoods to the northeast, following the loop of Rapid Creek, were swept away by a twelve foot wall of raging water.
People, the very people who had remarked about the idyllic spring morning just hours before, began dying by the score.
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The National Guard knew what was coming. Guardsmen went through those neighborhoods, imploring people to evacuate. But just a decade before, a similar flood warning had gone out, and an old timer said that the Guardsmen had told him then he had to leave, but the water never came up over the top step of his front stoop. Maybe he thought that would happen on this night, but what happened was the water struck with such force the entire house was torn from the moorings behind that front stoop, and shattered into kindling by every object of note as it was swept east, through the Gap, and the shards of what remained left strewn over the neighborhood just north of Omaha Street.
That neighborhood, once the home of the new Boys Club building, just dedicated seven years before, and the Mother Butler Center, where generations of Lakota had turned to for assistance and guidance and community fellowship, and home to thousands of working class Wasicu and urban Lakota, was swept from existence in less than an hour. Dozens more lost their lives.
The older brother’s Ford Falcon was not known for its fine tuned performance. It ran just well enough so the older brother didn’t have to walk, but on that night, it performed to a critical degree of responsiveness. Staying just ahead of the thunderous roar of the oncoming wall of debris bristling water, it was able to escape north, up onto the heights of North Rapid just beyond East North Street.
The wall of water continued on, slamming into the Trisco Feeds grain elevator, an eight story high signature landmark just on the north side of Omaha Street, and redirecting two blocks south; rushing down across the display lots of two car dealerships, and not playing itself out until it had smashed its way several miles down into Rapid Valley, claiming even more lives, and leaving the heart of the largest city in Western South Dakota gutted in its wake.
Rain had fallen in the previous week, saturating the ground, but even had this not happened, the June 9, 1972, rain clouds locked in place and emptied a deluge never before seen during recorded history—over fifteen inches of rain fell in six hours, nearly the entire equivalent of what Rapid City would normally get in a year. Rain fell so hard, wind shield wipers at their highest setting could not keep the windshield from remaining opaque.
When the deluge had spent itself, 238 people had died in the Black Hills, and 3,057 were injured, many critically so. Some bodies were never recovered, buried deep in mud that filled the exposed basements of shattered homes, lost forever in a torrent of water that left automobiles dangling from the bows of cottonwood trees eight feet off the ground. Almost 1,400 homes were destroyed, and an estimated 5,000 automobiles. The value of the damaged property was estimated at over $760 million in 2017 adjusted dollars.
Read the rest of the story on Native Sun News Today: Flood of ‘72
James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
