Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · Labs

Who Owned the Badlands? Homesteads around Medora, 1889–1957

When the federal government handed public land to a new owner, it left a paper trail. Follow it through 773 federal land patents in 12 townships around Medora and the Elkhorn Ranch area, from the first homestead claims to the land patented to the United States in the 1930s.

About the data

A land patent is the document in which the federal government handed title to a piece of public land to a new owner. The patent date is when that title was issued, which was often years after someone first filed a claim and moved onto the land.

What's covered

  • 12 townships: T139N–T141N and T143N, each in ranges R101W–R103W. The three T143N townships cover the Elkhorn Ranch area north of Medora; the label on the map marks that block of townships, not a specific site.
  • Federal land patents only, transcribed from BLM General Land Office (GLO) Records search results in October 2026: 805 patents in all, 773 of them drawn on the map.
  • The 22 big railroad and state grants are listed in the downloads but not drawn. They cover land across many townships and would blanket the map.
  • Land bought from a railroad, the state or another private owner never shows up in federal patent records, so plenty of families who lived here won't appear.

How the parcels were drawn

  • Each patent's land description was matched to the BLM's survey grid of 40-acre squares (quarter-quarter sections) and numbered government lots. When a description names a piece smaller than 40 acres, it is drawn on the whole square that contains it.
  • Where the search results list only the first two pieces of a patent, the full list was read from the record, so each mapped patent shows all the land it describes. A handful of record lines give no section number (for example "E2SE EXCL RR ROW"); those pieces are left off rather than guessed, and seven patents made up only of such lines aren't drawn.
  • Three unnamed 1903–1905 records that list dozens of whole sections across many townships are in the downloads but not drawn.
  • Sections 16 and 36 in each township were reserved school land, which is one reason some squares stay empty. Others were never patented, or passed through grants that aren't drawn.
  • The year slider starts in 1883, the year Theodore Roosevelt first came to Dakota Territory to hunt bison, and runs to 1960. No land in these townships had a federal patent until 1889, so the map starts out empty. One later patent, dated 1975, appears when the slider reaches its end.

What land am I on?

  • Tap any spot on the map, or use What land am I on? to use your phone's location. The card shows the township, section and 40-acre square, every federal patent covering that spot in date order, who manages the land today, and the Native history of the area.
  • Your location stays on your device. The lookup runs in your browser against the map's own data, and nothing is sent or saved.
  • Phone GPS is usually accurate to 5–20 meters, and a 40-acre square is about 400 meters across, so near a boundary the land next door may be the one that applies.
  • Land status today comes from the Bureau of Land Management's Surface Management Agency data. Private land is shown only as private; no owners are named.
  • The Native history draws on the National Park Service, the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, North Dakota Studies, and Charles Royce's Indian Land Cessions in the United States (1899), as digitized by the U.S. Forest Service. All 12 townships fall inside Royce cession area 620.

Reading a land description

The land column uses the survey shorthand from the records. S26 SWNW means the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 26, a 40-acre square. S34 NW is the whole northwest quarter of Section 34, 160 acres. LOT 4 is a numbered lot, usually along a township edge or a river.

Check the record

Every patent links to BLM GLO Records, where you can see the original document. The link opens BLM's search with the patent's accession number, and the record is the first result.

Credits

Land patents: Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records. Survey grid: BLM Cadastral National Spatial Data Infrastructure (PLSS). Basemap: USGS The National Map. Built by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Downloads

Free to use. Please credit BLM GLO Records and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

  • parcels.geojsonEvery mapped patent as a polygon (WGS84), with name, date, land description, township and accession number.
  • patents_unique.csvOne row per patent, including the railroad and state grants that aren't drawn on the map.
  • reacquisitions.csvLand patented to a homesteader and later patented to the United States. The source for the “Patented twice” cards.