Rancher and retired rodeo man Johnny Holloway has personal reasons for wanting to restore a series of wooden corrals built east of Eagle Butte in 1910. The 75 year old says he can remember when the old Diamond A stockyard was busy night and day with cattle being driven in, sorted, and loaded onto waiting train cars.
Holloway's father John Sr. worked for the Diamond A for a time. The Diamond A was once the largest cattle ranch in South Dakota, some 1.4 million acres, much of that on lease from the Cheyenne River Reservation. The Diamond A began to shrink after the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 put more control of reservation lands into the hands of tribes. The Dust Bowl, Great Depression, and changes in the cattle industry put the Diamond A out of business in 1944. The 1910 corrals began to deteriorate. The railroad line once used for shipping cattle was abandoned and eventually torn out. By the end of the 1990s, the still-standing posts and rails on the south side of U.S. 212 were just a stark skeleton of what the stockyards once were.
Johnny Holloway wasn't going to let it go that easy. In 2016, he started the process of restoring the corrals to a more-or-less their original condition. He used the best of the wood he could salvage but bought new or pretty-new wood when it was needed. Holloway's restoration was pretty much complete in the fall of 2019 so the round-up he'd planned for the corrals had to be put off for a while. If things work out in the fall of 2020, the old Diamond A stockyard will be a busy place once more.
Below: Watch an SDPB TV documentary about the history of South Dakota's Diamond A Ranch