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:
(1) to transfer to the Soil Conservation Service NPS lands outside the existing national monument boundary in order to compensate for 1,220 acres the SCS had turned over for inclusion in the national monument prior to its establishment in 1939;
(2) to transfer to the SCS equivalent lands (computed on a livestock-carrying-capacity basis) for lands that were to be acquired from the SCS by the NPS as the result of revised boundary studies;
(3) to transfer to the SCS federal lands which the NPS planned to eliminate from the national monument to use in exchange for non-federal lands remaining in the national monument after the boundary changes were made.[198]
The plan made it possible to transfer, without legislation, 3,678.19 acres of NPS lands lying outside the park boundary to the SCS. This was done by order of the Secretary of the Interior in July 1949.[199] These lands were acquired under the Resettlement Administration program and, in 1936 were transferred to the NPS. When Badlands National Monument was established in 1939, these lands were not within the boundary.[200]