In 1873 the territorial legislature designated part of this area as Tripp County in honor of lawyer and territorial judge Bartlett Tripp, and the county’s present boundaries were adopted in 1907. After federal consultations with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Congress passed the Tripp County Homestead Act in 1909 as part of a national program, and Governor Vessey issued the county election proclamation. Tripp County then experienced heated political controversy over the temporary county seat, as centrally located Lamro and railroad-adjacent Colome competed for it, with Lamro winning a county-wide election. A railroad extension later helped shape the contest for the permanent county seat when the Western Townsite Company bought land and negotiated with the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad to route to the townsite of Winner. After a bitter dispute, a second election declared Winner the permanent county seat. On election night, people from Winner took teams and wagons to Lamro to retrieve records from the old courthouse, Lamro residents resisted, and a free-for-all broke out; the records were fought over piece by piece, and those not destroyed were moved to Winner, where they were soon lost in a fire in the temporary courthouse. Later, an attempt to place the county back within the boundaries of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation was rejected by the United States Supreme Court in 1977. Another issue involved Tripp County’s provision of governmental services to the unorganized county of Todd; after problems and court cases over merging the counties, a state law restored each county as an independent unit of local government. In addition to Colome and Winner, active communities in Tripp County included Carter, Clearfield, Hamill, Ideal, Millboro, Keyapaha, Wewela, and Witten, and the county’s population in 1989 was 6,900.