Read an Excerpt
From Chapter Four: Cold War on the Range
Leonel Jensen was among the first South Dakotans to learn that his state was about to host the Minutemen. He was not a military man so he did not learn of deployment through those traditional channels. Rather, Jensen was a rancher with some land. And, like Vernon Taylor up in Montana, Jensen owned some land that the Air Force had taken a keen interest in— not for its proximity to the Jensen front yard or its worth as a good winter wheat field, the reasons that Leonel Jensen liked that particular field— but rather because it was relatively flat, within a specified distance from other predetermined
missile locations, and near enough to a road that the Air Force would not have to create an entirely new one to gain access. It was for those reasons that in early November 1960, Jensen received a rather odd visitor in search of soil samples for “a possible missile base.” Like Taylor in Montana, Jensen was asked to sign a right of entry for survey and exploration (which he did) and was told not to share information about the Air Force program with anyone; the Minuteman was an issue of great national importance and the authorities would provide information on a need- to- know basis only. For the time being, Jensen was to sit tight and stay quiet.
Jensen could stay quiet for only so long. The next week a larger, better- equipped survey team returned to his ranch and began taking soil samples. Jensen did not know it, but these were Army Corps of Engineers personnel making final soil borings. This time they
answered his queries with “courteous” though “abrupt” responses and told him that almost definitely the missile would be sited where they were boring, on a spot, according to Jensen, not amenable to his ranching operations. At this point Jensen decided to make some noise. In a November 16 letter, Jensen presented his quandary to
Senator Francis Case— not that the missile should be sited on someone else’s land, but that it should be sited somewhere else on his land. “We have five thousand acres in the ranch and we have plenty of places where a defense installation would not be objectionable . . .we can not quite see the practicallity [sic] or the fairness of the Defense Command just plotting on a map where the base should be and then putting it there.” Case’s response was prompt, if not totally satisfactory. In it he explained that through a conversation with the Air Force he had learned that no money was yet allocated to missile construction, so there might still be time to get the site moved.
For the rest of 1960, Jensen battled alone. He did not yet know that Gene Williams, just 30 miles to the east, and Cecil Hayes up north in Elm Springs, were also questioning government right- of- entry forms, worrying about land values, and seeking answers to what seemed a tangled web of bureaucracies, rationales, and expectations. In all, 198
landowners spread over 13,000 square miles of western South Dakota were approached by Army Corps of Engineers real estate agents that November. And all received the same information— some part of their land was needed for national security, and it was a secret program that should not be discussed. Publicity should be left to the experts.