MEDORA, N.D. — Dave Short stood on a high bluff and pointed down below to a stake driven into the ground on his family’s ranch along the Little Missouri River — a guidepost for bulldozers.
The stake on the valley floor marks the path of a proposed road that would lead to a bridge Billings County wants to build over the river deep in the heart of the Badlands. Next, he pointed to a knob jutting from the top of the butte, a landmark that also lies along the path of the bridge a project backer once said would carry a thousand oil trucks a day on a road less than a mile from his family’s ranch headquarters. “That whole butte would be torn off,” Short said.
Dust from traffic over the gravel road would force the Shorts to move their cattle feedlot to a new location. The road for the bridge would sever the ranch headquarters from the rest of the family’s sprawling land. “We don’t want that road,” he said.
“We don’t want that road for anything, and all that traffic across the flat, and all the dust covering everything. In the dry years, it’ll look apocalyptic.” ADVERTISEMENT The Short family’s fight to save its land could depend on a legal question of whether a county commission’s agreement to surrender its eminent domain authority can bind a future commission — or, put another way, when is a written promise not a binding promise? The ranch has been in the Short family for more than a century, when the family started ranching in 1904, during homestea.