South Dakota
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100 free South Dakota trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free South Dakota trivia questions with answers. South Dakota gets summed up as four faces on a mountain, and this quiz starts there, but it goes a lot further: the gold rush that pulled prospectors into the Black Hills, the poker hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding in Deadwood, the massacre at Wounded Knee, the drugstore that built an empire on free ice water, and the town whose civic arena is covered in corn every year. You will also meet the state's people and oddities: the vice president born above a drugstore, the game-show host raised on the Rosebud Reservation, the T. rex found near Faith, the two-minute temperature swing that still stands as a world record, and the state dessert nobody outside the Dakotas can pronounce. Questions run from easy openers on the capital and nickname to stumpers about caves, treaties and Lakota names. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, a park service page or a state reference, and the citation sits under each explanation. Play it solo, use it for a classroom unit or run it as a round at trivia night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of South Dakota?
Pierre
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.
Q 02Which classic children's book was written by a former Aberdeen, South Dakota, shopkeeper and newspaper editor?
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
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.
Q 03Which neighbouring state joined the Union on the very same day, 2 November 1889?
North Dakota
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.
Q 04Which river cuts South Dakota into the halves locals call East River and West River?
The Missouri
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.
Q 05What is South Dakota's most populous city?
Sioux Falls
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.
Q 06Which four presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 07Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 to 1941?
Gutzon Borglum
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.
Q 08The historian who first proposed a Black Hills carving wanted it to show which kind of figures?
Heroes of the American West
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.
Q 09What was New York lawyer Charles Rushmore doing in the Black Hills when the peak was named for him?
Checking mining claims
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.
Q 10Who ended up paying most of Mount Rushmore's bill of nearly $1 million?
The federal government
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.
Q 11Which part of the Crazy Horse Memorial was finished and unveiled in 1998, fifty years after carving began?
His face
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.
Q 12Which Lakota chief wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski in 1939 asking him to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial?
Henry Standing Bear
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.
Q 13Why are the Black Hills called 'black'?
Q 21Which Lakota leader who defeated Custer was killed by reservation police at Standing Rock in 1890?
Sitting Bull
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.
Q 22How is the name 'Dakota' usually translated from the Dakota language?
Ally or friend
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.
Q 23What did the Husteads famously advertise to turn Wall Drug into a roadside empire?
Free ice water
Their evergreen cover looks dark from a distance
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.
Q 14Which Cold War nuclear missile can visitors see in its silo at a national historic site beside the Badlands?
Minuteman
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.
Q 15What became of the 1980 Supreme Court award to the Sioux for the Black Hills?
The tribes refuse to accept it
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.
Q 16What was Wild Bill Hickok doing when he was shot dead in Deadwood on 2 August 1876?
Playing poker
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.
Q 17Which frontierswoman is buried beside Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery?
Calamity Jane
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.
Q 18How did the gold-rush town of Deadwood get its name?
From dead trees found in its gulch
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.
Q 19The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890 was carried out by which US Army unit?
The 7th Cavalry
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.
Q 20In 1973 Wounded Knee was occupied for 71 days by members of which organisation?
The American Indian Movement
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.
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.
Q 24Which South Dakota town is home to the 'World's Only Corn Palace'?
Mitchell
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.
Q 25The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally began in 1938 with a race staged by a local dealer of which motorcycle brand?
Indian
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.
Q 26Early French fur trappers named the Badlands for being bad lands to do what?
Travel across
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.
Q 27Which endangered animal, once thought extinct, was reintroduced to the wild in Badlands National Park?
The black-footed ferret
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.
Q 28Which Black Hills cave did Theodore Roosevelt make the world's first cave national park in 1903?
Wind Cave
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.
Q 29Jewel Cave near Custer is named for what?
Calcite crystals lining its walls
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.
Q 30The Homestake gold mine at Lead, worked for more than a century, was converted into what?
An underground physics laboratory
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.