The Great Plains
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50 free The Great Plains trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Great Plains run down the middle of North America like a sea of grass: flat to the eye, dry, windy and bigger than most countries. For thousands of years this was bison country, the land of nations whose whole way of life moved with the herds. Then, in barely a century, came explorers, wagon trains, railroads, cattle drives, plows and some of the worst storms the continent has ever seen. This quiz covers the whole sweep. There are questions on the plains states and their landmarks, rivers and weather; on the Native peoples of the plains and the wars fought over the land; on trails, cow towns, settlers and the hard 1930s; and on the animals, books, films and songs the region has given the world. It is written for anyone curious about the heartland of the continent: students working through a geography or history unit, teachers looking for a ready-made plains states quiz, and trivia players who like a question with a good story behind it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which icon of Western films is a Russian weed that reached South Dakota in 1870s flax seed?
Tumbleweed
Tumbleweed is mostly Russian thistle, which snaps off at the stem once it is dry and scatters its seeds as the wind rolls it across open country.
Q 02Which mail relay to California lasted only 18 months before the telegraph killed it off?
Pony Express
Pony Express riders cut coast-to-coast message time to about 10 days, but the transcontinental telegraph, finished in October 1861, made them obsolete almost at once.
Q 03What nickname for the storm-prone central US began as the title of a 1952 weather research project?
Tornado Alley
Tornado Alley has no official boundaries: it is simply where warm, humid air meets cold, dry air from Canada, helping give the US more twisters than any other country.
Q 04What name did a 1935 news report give the drought-hit southern Plains after the Black Sunday storm?
The Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl got its name from Associated Press coverage of April 14, 1935, a day when an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil blew off the prairie.
Q 05Which mountain range walls in the Great Plains on the west, from Alberta south to New Mexico?
Rocky Mountains
The Rocky Mountains run about 3,000 miles, and the Plains spread east from their base for 300 to 500 miles before giving way to wetter, lower country.
Q 06Which fencing patented by farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874 ended the open range on the Great Plains?
Barbed wire
Barbed wire made enclosing huge expanses cheaper than hiring cowboys, and cattlemen who lost free grazing hit back in the Fence Cutting Wars of the 1880s.
Q 07Which cone-shaped dwelling did Plains nations make by stretching bison hides over long poles?
A tipi
A tipi is set apart by the adjustable smoke flaps at its top, which vent a fire burning inside. The wigwam it is often confused with is a domed shelter covered in bark.
Q 08Mount Rushmore is carved into which mountain region of South Dakota that the Lakota hold sacred?
The Black Hills
The Black Hills rise out of the surrounding grassland to Black Elk Peak, the highest point in South Dakota.
Q 09Which Plains state has the only one-house legislature in the US, elected without party labels?
Nebraska
Nebraska voters scrapped their two-chamber system in a 1934 ballot initiative, and the first single-chamber session met in 1937.
Q 10Which army scout and railroad meat hunter later took a Wild West show to Europe?
Buffalo Bill
Buffalo Bill is said to have killed 4,282 bison in eighteen months feeding Kansas Pacific crews, and from 1883 William Cody's touring company turned frontier life into a circus-like spectacle.
Q 11Which river, nicknamed the Big Muddy for its load of silt, is the longest in the United States?
The Missouri
The Missouri River runs 2,341 miles from Montana across the northern Plains, about 200 miles less than in the 1800s because engineers have straightened its channel.
Q 12Which underground water reserve under parts of eight states keeps the dry High Plains farmable?
Ogallala Aquifer
The Ogallala Aquifer underlies about 174,000 square miles, but large-scale pumping only began after World War II, when car engines were adapted to drive the wells.
Q 13Which explorers first described the prairie dog in 1804, one later calling it a barking squirrel?
Lewis and Clark
Q 21Which land deal nearly doubled the size of the United States and took in most of the Great Plains?
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million, or about $18 a square mile, for 828,000 square miles of the continent's interior.
Q 22Which blacksmith's polished steel plow of 1837 could cut sticky prairie soil without clogging?
John Deere
John Deere, a Vermont-born smith working in Illinois, saw that soil slid off polished steel; one early version of the idea used an old saw blade.
Q 23Which Little House author spent her teenage years in the prairie town of De Smet, South Dakota?
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lewis and Clark came upon a whole village of the animals in September 1804, on the expedition President Jefferson sent to explore the West.
Q 14Which 1862 law signed by Abraham Lincoln gave settlers 160 acres of public land for farming it?
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act opened up millions of acres, but it only passed once the Southern states had seceded and their members had left Congress.
Q 15With wood and stone scarce, what did Plains settlers cut from the ground and stack into house walls?
Sod
Sod held together because prairie grass has a much thicker, tougher root mat than a lawn, and it was abundant and free.
Q 16Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family, driven out by drought, west to California?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
Q 17Which Plains animal, often wrongly called an antelope, is the fastest land mammal in the Americas?
Pronghorn
Pronghorn can run at up to 55 mph, slower than a cheetah, but can hold their top speed for much longer.
Q 18Which cavalry commander died with five troops of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn in June 1876?
George Custer
George Custer attacked a vast Native encampment in Montana with about 700 men; two of his brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law died alongside him.
Q 19Which 2,170-mile wagon route across the Plains gave its name to a classic educational computer game?
Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail carried about 400,000 emigrants west, and the game began in 1971 as a classroom project by three Carleton College students.
Q 20Which state holds the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, near the town of Lebanon?
Kansas
Kansas lost the wider title in 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union and pulled the center of all fifty states northwest into South Dakota.
Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish the first of her pioneer novels until 1932, when she was in her mid-sixties.
Q 24Which cattle town, dubbed queen of the cow towns, made lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson famous?
Dodge City
Dodge City took over the Texas cattle trade in 1876, when a quarantine line shut out rival railheads, and its gunfights soon filled the dime novels.
Q 25Which Plains national park of eroded pinnacles has the richest known Oligocene mammal fossil beds?
Badlands
Badlands is a straight translation of the Lakota name for the place, and its rock layers give a glimpse of life there 33 million years ago.
Q 26Which stone monolith rising from the Wyoming plains became the first US national monument in 1906?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower stands 867 feet from base to summit, and visitor numbers jumped after it hosted the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.
Q 27Which Hunkpapa Lakota leader led his band into Canada in 1877 and stayed for four years?
Sitting Bull
Sitting Bull had foreseen soldiers falling into the Lakota camp before the Little Bighorn; he came back in 1881 and was killed by agency police in 1890.
Q 28Which holiday began in 1872 when Plains settlers planted about a million trees in a single day?
Arbor Day
Arbor Day was founded by newspaper editor J. Sterling Morton, who was just as fierce in opposing the felling of healthy trees for Christmas decorations.
Q 29Which state's heartland opened at high noon in April 1889 as 50,000 settlers raced to stake claims?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma owes its nickname, the Sooner State, to settlers who slipped in before the official start to grab the best of the two million acres on offer.
Q 30Which Kevin Costner Western shot in South Dakota, with much dialogue in Lakota, won Best Picture?
Dances with Wolves
Dances with Wolves won seven Oscars and is credited with reviving the Hollywood Western, even though several studios had turned the project down.