50 Fun Facts About South Dakota

What is the capital of South Dakota?

Locals say it 'peer', not the French way. It has been the capital since statehood in 1889 and is one of only four state capitals with no Interstate highway.

What is South Dakota's official nickname?

Coyote State is an older unofficial nickname, and the coyote is still the state animal. The tourism slogan since 1990 is 'Great Faces. Great Places.'

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

President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the two admission papers before signing on 2 November 1889 so nobody would ever know which Dakota came first.

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

The split is cultural as much as geographic: East River is farm country, West River is ranch land and the Black Hills. The river also roughly marks the Central-Mountain time zone line.

What is South Dakota's most populous city?

It is named for the waterfalls of the Big Sioux River, which you can still walk to in Falls Park downtown.

Which four presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore?

The faces are 60 feet tall. Jefferson was first started on Washington's other side, but the rock was flawed and his half-finished face was dynamited off.

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

His son Lincoln finished the job after he died in March 1941. Around 400 workers blasted and drilled for 14 years without a single fatality.

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

Doane Robinson had Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill and Crazy Horse in mind. The sculptor insisted on presidents to give the project national appeal.

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

Charles Rushmore asked his guide the mountain's name, was told it had none, and was told it would be named after him. He later donated $5,000 to the carving.

What did the whole Mount Rushmore project cost, start to finish?

The final bill was $989,992.32, most of it federal money. The granite erodes about an inch every 10,000 years, so the faces should be around for a while.

The Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948, is planned to be how long when finished?

At 641 by 563 feet it would be the largest sculpture on Earth. Only the face is complete, unveiled in 1998, and the project has always refused federal money.

Which Lakota chief commissioned sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial?

He wrote to the sculptor in 1939 saying he wanted the white man to know 'the red man has great heroes, too'. The first blast came on 3 June 1948.

Why are the Black Hills called 'black'?

The Lakota name is Pahá Sápa. The range is really an isolated mountain island rising out of the Great Plains, older than the Rockies.

Gold was confirmed in the Black Hills in 1874 by an expedition led by which army officer?

The strike in French Creek triggered a rush onto land the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had promised to the Sioux 'forever'. Two years later the same officer died at Little Bighorn.

What has happened to the compensation the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux for the Black Hills in 1980?

The award has sat in trust gathering interest, passing $1 billion by 2011, because taking the money would mean giving up the claim to the land itself.

Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead in Deadwood on 2 August 1876. What was he doing at the time?

The aces and eights he supposedly held became known as the 'dead man's hand'. His killer, Jack McCall, was tried twice and hanged the following year.

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

She had asked to be laid to rest next to him. Whether they were ever more than acquaintances is still argued about.

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

The town boomed to 25,000 people between 1876 and 1879. Casino gambling, legalised in 1989, revived it a century later, and the whole town is a National Historic Landmark.

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

It was the same regiment that Custer had led to disaster at Little Bighorn 14 years earlier. At least 146 Lakota died, many of them women and children.

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

The armed standoff with federal marshals and the FBI drew worldwide attention to conditions on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Two occupiers were killed.

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

Officers came to arrest him over fears he would join the Ghost Dance. Five years earlier he had toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for about $50 a week.

What does the word 'Dakota' mean in the Dakota language?

The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota are the three dialect groups of the people outsiders lumped together as the Sioux.

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

The pitch was aimed at hot travellers heading to the newly opened Mount Rushmore. Wall Drug still sells coffee for 5 cents and its billboards turn up on every continent.

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

The building's exterior murals are made of corn and grain and redesigned every year. Inside it is a working arena where the Dakota Wesleyan Tigers play basketball.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally began in 1938 as a small event for riders of which motorcycle brand?

Founder Clarence 'Pappy' Hoel owned the local dealership and formed the Jackpine Gypsies club. Attendance peaked at an estimated 739,000 in 2015.

The Lakota name for the Badlands, makȟóšiča, translates literally as what?

French trappers agreed, calling it 'les mauvaises terres à traverser'. The layered buttes hold the richest known deposits of Oligocene mammal fossils, 33 million years old.

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

The ferrets depend on prairie dog towns for food and burrows. The park's bison herd, started with 50 animals in 1963, now numbers over 1,200.

Wind Cave, protected by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, holds what distinction?

About 95 percent of the world's known boxwork formations are inside it. It got its name when the pressure-driven wind at the entrance blew a discoverer's hat off in 1881.

Jewel Cave near Custer is named for what?

With more than 220 miles mapped it is the fifth-longest cave in the world, and Theodore Roosevelt made it a national monument in 1908.

The Homestake Mine at Lead, once the largest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere, was converted into what?

Raymond Davis Jr. detected the first solar neutrinos nearly a mile down there in the 1960s and won a Nobel Prize for it. The mine produced more than 40 million ounces of gold before closing in 2002.

The Mammoth Site at Hot Springs holds the remains of dozens of mammoths. How did they die there?

The warm spring-fed pond had steep, slippery sides. It was found in 1974 when a construction worker turned up bones while grading a housing subdivision.

'Sue' the T. rex was dug up in 1990 near which South Dakota town?

After a long ownership battle the skeleton went to auction and fetched $8.36 million, the most ever paid for a fossil at the time.

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

A chinook wind did it, and it remains the fastest temperature change ever recorded. Car windscreens reportedly cracked from the shock.

What is South Dakota's official state dessert?

The German-style custard cake reflects the state's largest ancestry group. The state bread, adopted in 2005, is fry bread.

Which bird, not native to North America, is South Dakota's state bird?

The Asian import was released in the state in 1908 and thrived so well that pheasant hunting is now a major autumn tourism draw.

Which dinosaur is South Dakota's official state fossil?

The three-horned herbivore was adopted in 1988. Its remains turn up in the Hell Creek Formation in the state's northwest.

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 vice president was born in a room above his father's drugstore in Wallace, South Dakota?

He served under Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1969 and lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon by less than one percent of the popular vote.

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

He carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia against Richard Nixon. He grew up in Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace.

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

He went to high school in Yankton and graduated from the University of South Dakota before starting in local TV in Omaha.

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

He went on to host The Price Is Right for 35 years and signed off every episode reminding viewers to spay and neuter their pets.

Laura Ingalls Wilder married Almanzo Wilder in 1885 in which South Dakota town?

Her father filed a homestead claim there over the winter of 1879-80. Four of the Little House books are set in the town, which still hosts a pageant every summer.

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

Kevin Costner's directing debut took seven Oscars in 1991. The Triple U herd stood in for the great buffalo herds of the 1860s.

Where were the Mount Rushmore face scenes in North by Northwest actually shot?

Hitchcock was allowed to film in only one building at the park, the Memorial View Building's Buffalo Room. Everything on the rock face was matte paintings and studio sets.

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

The move made the state a credit-card capital almost overnight and is why so many card statements carry a Sioux Falls address.

A 1972 flash flood in the state's second-largest city killed how many people?

Up to 15 inches of rain fell in the Black Hills in a few hours and Canyon Lake Dam failed after dark. The city turned the floodplain into parkland afterwards.

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

At 7,244 feet Black Elk Peak is the highest point in the state, and a stone fire lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps still crowns the summit.

To which South Dakota town did Adam Vinatieri move at age five?

He grew up in the shadow of the Black Hills and went on to 2,673 career points with the Patriots and Colts.

Custer State Park is South Dakota's first and largest state park. Roughly how many bison roam it?

Every autumn cowboys drive the herd into corrals for the Buffalo Roundup while thousands watch. Feral 'begging burros' also patrol the park's Wildlife Loop Road for handouts.

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie set aside the Black Hills for the Sioux for how long?

The promise lasted six years, until gold was found. The Great Sioux Reservation was then carved up in 1877 and again in 1889.