100 Fun Facts About South Dakota

What is the capital of South Dakota?

Pierre, which locals pronounce 'peer', won the capital in 1889 because it sits near the geographic centre of the state, beating rivals such as Huron.

Which classic children's book was written by a former Aberdeen, South Dakota, shopkeeper and newspaper editor?

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came from L. Frank Baum, whose Aberdeen store, Baum's Bazaar, failed within two years, as did the newspaper he ran next; he left for Chicago in 1891 and only then turned to children's books.

Which neighbouring state joined the Union on the very same day, 2 November 1889?

North Dakota arrived with its twin: President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the two admission papers before signing so nobody would know which came first, and by alphabet North is counted 39th and South 40th.

Which river cuts South Dakota into the halves locals call East River and West River?

The Missouri splits the state in culture as much as geography: East River is farm country with most of the people, while West River is ranch land and the Black Hills.

What is South Dakota's most populous city?

Sioux Falls is named for the Big Sioux River's falls, which investors trusted to power the seven-storey Queen Bee Mill in 1881; the flow proved too weak and the mill shut within two years.

Which four presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore?

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt: Jefferson was first started on Washington's other side, but the rock there was too weak, so the half-carved face was blasted away and begun again.

Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 to 1941?

Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, months before the end, so his son Lincoln finished the job; nearly 400 workers blasted and drilled for 14 years without a single death.

The historian who first proposed a Black Hills carving wanted it to show which kind of figures?

Heroes of the American West such as Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were Doane Robinson's plan to lure tourists, but the sculptor held out for presidents to give the carving national appeal.

What was New York lawyer Charles Rushmore doing in the Black Hills when the peak was named for him?

Checking mining claims for eastern investors, Charles Rushmore reportedly asked what the peak was called; told it had no name, his companions said they would call it Rushmore.

Who ended up paying most of Mount Rushmore's bill of nearly $1 million?

The federal government covered most of it: President Coolidge promised money at the 1927 dedication, and New Deal relief funds kept the drills running through the Depression.

Which part of the Crazy Horse Memorial was finished and unveiled in 1998, fifty years after carving began?

His face, 87 feet tall, is an imagined likeness, since no photograph of Crazy Horse is known to exist; the full rider is planned at 641 feet long, which would make it the world's largest sculpture.

Which Lakota chief wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski in 1939 asking him to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial?

Henry Standing Bear wrote that his fellow chiefs wanted the white man to know 'the red man has great heroes, too', and he chose a sculptor who had briefly worked on Mount Rushmore.

Why are the Black Hills called 'black'?

Their evergreen cover looks dark from a distance: the English name translates the Lakota Pahá Sápa, 'hills that are black', for a pine-clad island of mountains rising from the open plains.

Which Cold War nuclear missile can visitors see in its silo at a national historic site beside the Badlands?

Minuteman missiles stood on constant alert in hundreds of silos hidden across the Great Plains for thirty years; at the Delta-09 silo near Wall, visitors now peer through glass at one still in place.

What became of the 1980 Supreme Court award to the Sioux for the Black Hills?

The tribes refuse to accept it because taking the money would mean the Black Hills were for sale; the award has sat in trust gathering interest and had passed $1 billion by 2011.

What was Wild Bill Hickok doing when he was shot dead in Deadwood on 2 August 1876?

Playing poker with his back to the door, a seat he normally refused; the aces and eights he supposedly held became the 'dead man's hand', and killer Jack McCall was tried twice before hanging in 1877.

Which frontierswoman is buried beside Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery?

Calamity Jane is said to have asked on her deathbed in 1903 to be buried beside him; whether the two were ever more than acquaintances is still argued about.

How did the gold-rush town of Deadwood get its name?

From dead trees found in its gulch: the 1876 gold camp was struggling by the 1980s, so South Dakota legalised gambling there in 1989, and casino revenue now pays to preserve its historic buildings.

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890 was carried out by which US Army unit?

The 7th Cavalry was Custer's old regiment, routed at Little Bighorn 14 years earlier; it killed at least 150 Lakota, nearly half of them women and children, yet the Army called it a battle and awarded Medals of Honor.

In 1973 Wounded Knee was occupied for 71 days by members of which organisation?

The American Indian Movement held the hamlet for 71 days, choosing the 1890 massacre site for its symbolism to protest conditions on Pine Ridge; two occupiers were shot dead in the standoff with federal agents.

Which Lakota leader who defeated Custer was killed by reservation police at Standing Rock in 1890?

Sitting Bull was seized before dawn because agents feared he would join the Ghost Dance; five years earlier he had earned $50 a week for riding once around the arena in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

How is the name 'Dakota' usually translated from the Dakota language?

Ally or friend is the usual translation, a nod to the alliance of bands known as the Seven Council Fires; 'Sioux', by contrast, is an outsiders' name, a French shortening of what Algonquian-speaking neighbours called them.

What did the Husteads famously advertise to turn Wall Drug into a roadside empire?

Free ice water was Dorothy Hustead's idea in the hot summer of 1936, five years into a failing small-town drugstore; thirsty drivers were already pulling in before Ted got back from putting up the first highway signs.

Which South Dakota town is home to the 'World's Only Corn Palace'?

Mitchell built its first Corn Palace in 1892 to prove to would-be settlers that South Dakota's soil was rich; the murals of naturally coloured corn are stripped and redesigned around a new theme every year.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally began in 1938 with a race staged by a local dealer of which motorcycle brand?

Indian was the franchise Clarence 'Pappy' Hoel bought in Sturgis in 1936; two years later he and his new club, the Jackpine Gypsies, staged a small race that grew into a rally drawing hundreds of thousands of riders.

Early French fur trappers named the Badlands for being bad lands to do what?

Travel across: the trappers' phrase was 'les mauvaises terres à traverser', beside the Lakota name mako sica, because the maze of jagged canyons and buttes, with little drinkable water, is so hard to cross.

Which endangered animal, once thought extinct, was reintroduced to the wild in Badlands National Park?

The black-footed ferret was written off as extinct in 1979 until a colony turned up in Wyoming in 1981; captive-bred descendants were released in the Badlands, where prairie dogs supply both their food and their burrows.

Which Black Hills cave did Theodore Roosevelt make the world's first cave national park in 1903?

Wind Cave got its name in 1881 when, as the story goes, wind rushing out of a small hole in the ground blew the hat off one of the Bingham brothers as he leaned in to look.

Jewel Cave near Custer is named for what?

Calcite crystals lining its walls gave the cave its name: the Michaud brothers, gold prospectors, enlarged the entrance in 1900 and filed a claim to mine them, then turned to selling cave tours when the mining failed.

The Homestake gold mine at Lead, worked for more than a century, was converted into what?

An underground physics laboratory fills the old workings because nearly a mile of rock shields its detectors from cosmic rays; Raymond Davis's neutrino work there from the 1960s earned a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize.

How did the dozens of mammoths at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs die?

Trapped in a sinkhole: warm water and greenery lured them into a steep-sided pond they could not climb out of, and the bones surfaced in 1974 when a grader levelling a housing development struck a tusk.

Which nickname belongs to the T. rex found near Faith, South Dakota, in 1990 and displayed at Chicago's Field Museum?

Sue is named for Sue Hendrickson, who spotted the bones; after a five-year custody battle the skeleton sold in 1997 for more than $8 million, then an auction record for a fossil, with McDonald's and Disney helping the museum pay.

On 22 January 1943 the temperature in Spearfish rose from -4°F to 45°F in how long?

Two minutes was all a chinook wind needed, setting a world record for the fastest temperature rise; when the wind died the mercury fell 58 degrees in 27 minutes, cracking plate-glass windows and frosting windshields over.

Which treat, brought by German-Russian settlers, is South Dakota's official state dessert?

Kuchen is simply German for cake, yet the prairie version is closer to a pie: a sweet dough crust holding a custard filling, often with fruit.

Which game bird is South Dakota's state bird?

Ring-necked pheasant, which is not a native bird at all: it is an Asian import that took hold in America only in the 1880s, yet South Dakota made it the state bird in 1943.

Which dinosaur is South Dakota's official state fossil?

Triceratops horns first turned up near Denver in 1887 and were taken for those of a giant bison; South Dakota's own specimen came out of Harding County in 1927.

What is South Dakota's official state sport?

It was adopted in 2003. The state drink is milk, and the state jewelry is Black Hills gold, with its tri-colour grape-leaf designs.

Which future vice president was born in tiny Wallace, South Dakota, in 1911, the son of the town druggist?

Hubert Humphrey earned a pharmacist's licence and helped run the family drugstore through the Depression before entering politics, serving as Lyndon Johnson's vice president from 1965 to 1969.

Which South Dakota senator was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972?

George McGovern, a decorated World War II pilot who ran on ending the Vietnam War, carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia against Richard Nixon, losing even South Dakota.

Which longtime NBC Nightly News anchor was born in Webster, South Dakota?

Tom Brokaw also named a generation: his 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, on Americans shaped by the Depression and World War II, gave that age group the label it still carries.

Which game-show host spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Reservation in Mission, South Dakota?

Bob Barker went to grade school in Mission, where his mother taught, and from 1982 he closed The Price Is Right by urging viewers to have their pets spayed or neutered.

Which South Dakota town is the little town in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie?

De Smet did not yet exist when the Ingalls family arrived in 1879, when Laura was 12; the town that grew up around them fills several of her Little House books and restages them in a pageant each summer.

Which Best Picture winner filmed its bison hunt at South Dakota's Triple U Buffalo Ranch?

Dances with Wolves ran the ranch's real herd for the hunt, but the bison that charges a fallen boy was a tame animal named Cody, sprinting toward a pile of Oreo cookies heaped behind the actor.

Where was North by Northwest's chase across Mount Rushmore's faces actually shot?

On a soundstage at MGM in California, because officials would not allow filming on the carving itself; Hitchcock had a large-scale model of the faces built and intercut it with real footage of the monument.

Which bank moved its credit-card operations to Sioux Falls in 1981 after South Dakota scrapped its rate cap?

Citibank was losing money on cards because New York capped the interest it could charge below its own cost of borrowing; Governor Bill Janklow had South Dakota lift its cap and invite the bank in, in exchange for jobs.

After the 1972 flood that killed 238 people, what did Rapid City do with its ruined creekside land?

Turned it into parkland: after Canyon Lake Dam failed in the night, the city bought out the homes and businesses along Rapid Creek and barred rebuilding, leaving a greenway of parks where the water ran deepest.

The Black Hills summit renamed in 2016 for a Lakota holy man was previously called what?

Harney Peak had honoured General William Harney, whose troops killed Lakota women and children at Blue Water Creek in 1855; that history drove the campaign that gave South Dakota's highest summit to Black Elk instead.

Which NFL kicker grew up in Rapid City and played college football at South Dakota State?

Adam Vinatieri won two Super Bowls for the Patriots with field goals in the final seconds, a 48-yarder against the Rams as time expired and another against the Panthers two years later.

Which South Dakota park draws thousands of spectators each autumn as riders drive its bison herd into corrals?

Custer State Park stages its Buffalo Roundup every autumn: cowboys and cowgirls push the herd about five miles into corrals, where calves are branded and vaccinated before a crowd that can reach 20,000.

What did the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie promise the Sioux regarding the Black Hills?

Exclusive use of the land, in the treaty's words 'absolute and undisturbed use and occupation', held only until an 1874 army expedition found gold; miners poured in and the government confiscated the hills in 1877.

About 90 percent of the rock removed from Mount Rushmore during its carving came off using what?

Dynamite did most of the carving, with powdermen setting charges so precisely that only three to six inches of granite were left for the finishing tools.

What fell on Vivian, South Dakota, in July 2010 and set US records for both diameter and weight?

A hailstone eight inches across and weighing nearly two pounds landed on Vivian, breaking a record set in Aurora, Nebraska, seven years earlier.

Which Leonardo DiCaprio film retells Hugh Glass's 1823 grizzly mauling in what is now South Dakota?

The Revenant won DiCaprio his first Oscar for playing Glass, who was left for dead near today's Shadehill Reservoir and dragged himself some 200 miles to Fort Kiowa.

The four figures on Mount Rushmore were originally meant to be carved down to which body part?

The waist was the goal, but money ran out in October 1941, and only one of the four figures shows any detail below the chin.

Which outlaw allegedly shook off a posse at Devil's Gulch near Garretson, South Dakota, in 1876?

Jesse James is said to have reached Devil's Gulch while fleeing the raid on the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota.

Rapid City, South Dakota, lines its downtown street corners with life-size bronze statues of whom?

US presidents stand on the corners in life-size bronze, a walking-tour series that earned Rapid City the nickname City of Presidents.

South Dakota is split between which two time zones, with the western half an hour behind the east?

Central and Mountain time divide the state, so Mount Rushmore and Rapid City keep Mountain Time while the capital and the largest city run on Central.

Which 1997 sci-fi film used ranchland near Kadoka and South Dakota's Badlands as an alien planet?

Starship Troopers set its planet Tango Urilla there because the bare, rolling ground had so little vegetation that it could pass for another world.

Which PC maker with cow-spotted boxes moved its headquarters to North Sioux City, South Dakota?

Gateway arrived from Iowa as Gateway 2000 and shipped its computers in white boxes with black spots modelled on Holstein cows.

In the 1890s South Dakota's largest city was dubbed a 'Colony' for outsiders who came seeking what?

A divorce was far easier to win there, thanks to some of the nation's most permissive laws and good rail links, until residency rules tightened in 1908.

Which two states meet South Dakota's western edge, on the far side of the Black Hills?

Wyoming and Montana lie to the west and northwest, completing a ring of six neighbours that also includes Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska.

Which highway crosses South Dakota from east to west, passing the Badlands and Rapid City?

Interstate 90 runs the width of the state through its southern half, while Interstate 29 carries north–south traffic along the eastern side.

Most of what is now South Dakota passed to the United States in 1803 through which agreement?

Louisiana Purchase territory bought from Napoleon took in most of the future state, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition was sent out to explore it.

South Dakota is one of a handful of US states that does not levy which tax on individuals?

Income tax is absent for both people and corporations, and the state also levies no inheritance tax.

Which kind of warship was the USS South Dakota, whose memorial traces its outline at full scale?

A battleship and the lead vessel of its class, South Dakota is remembered by a low wall in the shape of its hull, with an anchor and a 16-inch gun displayed inside.

In which Best Picture winner does Frances McDormand work at Wall Drug and camp in the Badlands?

Nomadland sends its van-dwelling heroine Fern to a restaurant job at Wall Drug and a stint as camp host at Cedar Pass in Badlands National Park.

In National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which city of gold lies hidden beneath Mount Rushmore?

Cíbola turns up in a cavern under the memorial, which the film's plot says was carved to hide the landmarks that pointed to the city.

Which president spent the summer of 1927 in the Black Hills, working from an office in Rapid City?

Calvin Coolidge holidayed there for several weeks with his wife Grace, and it was in Rapid City that he told reporters he did not choose to run again in 1928.

Which Lakota ceremony of 1890 alarmed settlers and the Army before the Wounded Knee Massacre?

The Ghost Dance came from the Paiute prophet Wovoka, and Lakota dancers wore ghost shirts that were said to turn away bullets.

In 1989 Deadwood, South Dakota, legalised which activity to pay for preserving its old buildings?

Gambling was then legal only in Nevada and Atlantic City, and Deadwood became the first small community to seek the revenue to maintain its historic assets.

A monument in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, marks which geographic title the area gained in 1959?

Centre of the 50 states is the honour, because admitting Alaska and Hawaii dragged the national midpoint some 550 miles northwest from Lebanon, Kansas.

The site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre lies on which Lakota reservation in South Dakota?

Pine Ridge, home of the Oglala Lakota, was where Spotted Elk's band was heading to shelter with Red Cloud when soldiers intercepted them.

Before it was renamed for a New York lawyer, Mount Rushmore was known to the Lakota by which name?

The Six Grandfathers took its name from six head-like knobs along the summit ridge, linked to the spirits of the six directions in Lakota belief.

Which reservoir beginning just north of South Dakota's capital is named for an 1874 mission?

Lake Oahe has some 2,250 miles of shoreline, and the old town of Forest City lies drowned beneath it.

Iron Mountain Road in the Black Hills loops over itself on spiral spans known locally by which name?

Pigtail bridges were introduced in 1932 by Cecil Clyde Gideon, a self-taught park superintendent turned highway designer, to let a road climb rapidly.

The 50-foot steel statue Dignity near Chamberlain, South Dakota, shows a Native woman holding what?

A star quilt made of more than 100 blue diamond shapes that move in the wind completes the figure, the work of state artist laureate Dale Lamphere.

Which lone peak near Sturgis, South Dakota, is a sacred site where pilgrims tie prayer cloths?

Bear Butte is Mato Paha to the Lakota, and the Cheyenne hold that their prophet Sweet Medicine received his people's customs there.

Which animal is the nickname of South Dakota State University's teams, who play in Brookings?

Jackrabbit teams from South Dakota State won back-to-back national football titles, sealing the second with a perfect 15–0 record in January 2024.

The 109-mile George S. Mickelson Trail through the Black Hills follows the abandoned route of what?

A railroad line built in 1890–91 by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy carried its last train in 1986 before becoming the trail from Edgemont to Deadwood.

Aberdeen, South Dakota, held a two-hour parade in 1963 to celebrate the Fischer family's what?

Quintuplets born to the Fischers were the first in the United States to survive, and 50,000 people turned out to watch the parade a month later.

Which former mining town, founded in 1883, lies about two miles from Mount Rushmore?

Keystone began as a mining town and reinvented itself as a resort, serving the millions of visitors who pass through on their way to the memorial.

Which nickname belongs to the Buffalo, South Dakota, T. rex that sold for $31.8 million in 2020?

Stan fetched what was then the highest price ever paid for a fossil, a mark that lasted until a Stegosaurus called Apex sold for $44.6 million in 2024.

Daktronics, founded in 1968 by two professors in Brookings, South Dakota, became a maker of what?

Scoreboards became its line after a college wrestling coach asked the young firm for a better one, and the resulting Matside model was its first product in the field.

Who shot Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, was acquitted by a miners' court, then hanged after a retrial?

Jack McCall was cleared in two hours by a jury of miners and businessmen, but a court in Yankton ruled that double jeopardy did not apply and he was hanged in 1877.

Which hardware merchant was a sheriff in 1870s Deadwood and later ran a hotel bearing his name?

Seth Bullock, born in what is now Ontario, moved to the gold-rush town in 1876 after spotting an untapped market for hardware there.

Rapid City's Chapel in the Hills is an exact replica of a medieval stave church in which country?

Norway's Department of Antiquities supplied blueprints of the Borgund stave church, considered the country's most completely preserved, so the chapel could copy it.

Which Anabaptist group founded South Dakota's Bon Homme Colony, its oldest surviving colony, in 1874?

The Hutterites who settled Bon Homme came from what is now Ukraine under Michael Waldner, who had revived communal living among them in 1859.

The Explorer II crew set a 1935 altitude record after lifting off from South Dakota's Stratobowl in what?

A balloon filled with helium carried its two-man crew to 72,395 feet, a height nobody beat for nearly two decades.

The 1888 storm that killed some 235 people across Dakota Territory and the Plains goes by which name?

The Children's Blizzard struck without warning on a relatively warm January day, catching many people unprepared, among them pupils in one-room schoolhouses.

Which mining magnate, father of a newspaper tycoon, took control of the Homestake Mine in 1877?

George Hearst and two partners paid $70,000 for the claim, and he hauled in the machinery by wagon from the nearest railhead in Sidney, Nebraska.

Which Black Hills granite spires were the first site proposed for the carving now on Mount Rushmore?

The Needles drew the strongest opposition of the whole project, and the 490-foot pillars were later judged too small and unstable to carry sculpture on that scale.

Lewis and Clark climbed Spirit Mound in South Dakota in 1804 after hearing it housed which beings?

Little people about 18 inches high with very large heads were said to guard the hill, armed with sharp arrows that could strike from a long way off.

In 1913 children on a South Dakota hillside found a lead plate buried in the 1740s by which explorers?

The La Vérendrye brothers, the first known Europeans in the area, left the plate with France's coat of arms on a bluff to claim the territory for their king.

Which Air Force base outside Rapid City was renamed in 1953 for a general killed in a bomber crash?

Ellsworth honours Brigadier General Richard Ellsworth, one of 23 airmen killed when an RB-36 crashed in Newfoundland on its way home from an exercise in Europe.

In 1898 South Dakota became the first US state to adopt which tool of direct democracy?

The referendum arrived in South Dakota in 1898 but went unused anywhere in the country until Oregon voters first tried it in 1906.

The EROS Center near South Dakota's largest city serves as the national archive of what?

Satellite images of the Earth's land surface are stored there, at a site picked because it could receive signals from a satellite passing over any part of the lower 48 states.

Which city is home to the University of South Dakota, founded by the territorial legislature in 1862?

Vermillion got the university 27 years before statehood, which makes it the state's oldest public university as well as its flagship.

Which Lakota holy man, a veteran of Little Bighorn, told his life story to poet John Neihardt?

Black Elk was a second cousin of Crazy Horse, and his interviews with the poet became a 1932 book about his visions and his life.

The seven dinosaurs of Dinosaur Park, built above Rapid City in 1936, have skins made of what?

Concrete was laid over wire mesh and black iron pipe by Works Progress Administration crews, in a park built to catch tourists heading for Mount Rushmore.

Which name do the Sioux peoples use for their whole nation, a phrase meaning Seven Council Fires?

Oceti Sakowin counts the Lakota as one of its seven fires, and the other six are Dakota-speaking nations, including the Yankton and the Sisseton.