During the ten years following the end of World War II, there was slow progress in the area’s development. Work on the custodian’s residence at Cedar Pass, begun in 1941, was completed in 1946.[179] Early in 1953 two additional houses, both prefabricated, were completed.[180] In January 1948 commercial power was brought to Cedar Pass and Interior with the completion of a single-phase power line by the Rural Electrification Administration.[181] The Northwestern Bell Telephone Company extended telephone service to the national monument headquarters in September 1952.[182] (This service was officially taken over by the Golden West Telephone Cooperative, Inc., in October 1960.)[183]
During the travel seasons of 1946 and 1947 there was much adverse criticism of the national monument roads. The maintenance equipment was in poor condition and usually undergoing repairs when most needed.[184] In the summer of 1948 about 4 miles of road was black-topped between the Cedar Pass junction and Norbeck Pass; this represented the first paving of U.S. Route 16A in the national monument.[185] The present northeast entrance road, about 3½ miles long, was completed in October 1951. It opened up a new area of the Badlands known as the Window Section.[186] This road was made possible by the donation in 1946 of a 160-acre, strategically located land parcel by Mr. Ben Millard who had purchased it from Jackson County in March 1941 for this purpose.[187]
During the late 1940’s and early 1950’s buildings constructed as temporary structures in the ERA and CCC period were remodeled and continued in use for headquarters and utility purposes.[188]
Both the grazing and the land ownership problems at the national monument were compounded by the war. With increased rainfall in the region during the decade of the 1940’s and the rising price of beef, the situation of the ranchers greatly improved. Under a plan suggested by Congressman Case in January 1943 to help in the “Beef for Victory Program,” the Service authorized for the first time in April the issuance of grazing permits on federally owned grasslands within the national monument. Under this program, the lands were divided into seven grazing units. An orderly grazing plan was established with the cooperation of the Soil Conservation Service.[190] Stricklin was able to identify and locate all cattle and sheep outfits that claimed to be using the national monument lands in conjunction with their SCS allotments.[191] Following the war authorized grazing remained one of the area’s major management problems for over a decade.
Stricklin wrote about an interesting sidelight of the grazing problem:
The roundup and disposal of several hundred head of unclaimed and so-called wild horses in the Sage Creek basin was a source of much concern on the part of both ranchers and the Custodian, the ranchers claiming the wild stallions were enticing away their mares. The Custodian’s concern was partly because of the damage these herds were doing to the range, but largely because it was practically the only program of any kind on which the National Park Service and the ranchers could even remotely agree. Several roundups were collaborated in, during which the herds were drastically reduced. Airplanes were used on at least one of the roundups to flush horses out of the canyons and keep them from breaking back on their route to Scenic and the loading chutes. Jack and Mamie Close, ranchers on Quinn Table, were the leaders among the ranchers in this work.[192]
Feral horses were eventually eliminated through roundups and returned to their owners. The last roundup took place in the national monument in 1963.[193]
With the improvement of their lot, many ranchers who had been destitute only a few years earlier were in a position to purchase county lands within the national monument boundary. The custodian reported in April 1943 that practically all such land within the boundary was leased for grazing and that much of it was recently bought by sheep and cattle ranchers.[194] In 1946 Stricklin reported a considerable change in land ownership where much of the land formerly controlled by Pennington County had passed into private ownership.[195] Later the same year Jackson County auctioned all of its 3,000 acres of land within the boundary to private individuals. Practically all of the 14,000 acres which was owned by the two counties two years earlier had passed into private ownership.[196]
The location of the boundary had been a subject of discussion since the national monument was established in 1939. The area contained a large acreage of grassland which the Soil Conservation Service believed should be released for grazing purposes. There was also overlapping jurisdiction between the two federal agencies.[197]
After several years of study, the NPS and the SCS arrived at an understanding on the national monument boundary and mutual land problems. In 1946 the two agencies signed an agreement known as Recommended Program of Procedure for boundary adjustment of Badlands National Monument. The NPS agreed: