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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of South Dakota?
Pierre
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.
Q 02What is South Dakota's official nickname?
The Mount Rushmore State
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.'
Q 03Which neighbouring state joined the Union on the very same day, 2 November 1889?
North Dakota
President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the two admission papers before signing on 2 November 1889 so nobody would ever know which Dakota came first.
Q 04Which river cuts South Dakota into the halves locals call East River and West River?
The Missouri
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.
Q 05What is South Dakota's most populous city?
Sioux Falls
It is named for the waterfalls of the Big Sioux River, which you can still walk to in Falls Park downtown.
Q 06Which four presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 07Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 to 1941?
Gutzon Borglum
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.
Q 08The historian who first proposed a Black Hills carving wanted it to show which kind of figures?
Heroes of the American West
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.
Q 09What was New York lawyer Charles Rushmore doing in the Black Hills when the peak was named for him?
Checking mining claims
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.
Q 10What did the whole Mount Rushmore project cost, start to finish?
Just under $1 million
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.
Q 11The Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948, is planned to be how long when finished?
641 feet
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.
Q 12Which Lakota chief commissioned sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve the Crazy Horse Memorial?
Henry Standing Bear
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.
Q 13Why are the Black Hills called 'black'?
Their evergreen cover looks dark from a distance
Q 21Which Lakota leader who defeated Custer was killed by reservation police at Standing Rock in 1890?
Sitting Bull
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.
Q 22What does the word 'Dakota' mean in the Dakota language?
Ally or friend
The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota are the three dialect groups of the people outsiders lumped together as the Sioux.
Q 23What did the Husteads famously advertise to turn Wall Drug into a roadside empire?
Free ice water
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.
The Lakota name is Pahá Sápa. The range is really an isolated mountain island rising out of the Great Plains, older than the Rockies.
Q 14Gold was confirmed in the Black Hills in 1874 by an expedition led by which army officer?
George Armstrong Custer
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.
Q 15What has happened to the compensation the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux for the Black Hills in 1980?
The tribes refuse to accept it
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.
Q 16Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead in Deadwood on 2 August 1876. What was he doing at the time?
Playing poker
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.
Q 17Which frontierswoman is buried beside Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery?
Calamity Jane
She had asked to be laid to rest next to him. Whether they 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
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.
Q 19The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890 was carried out by which US Army unit?
The 7th Cavalry
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.
Q 20In 1973 Wounded Knee was occupied for 71 days by members of which organisation?
The American Indian Movement
The armed standoff with federal marshals and the FBI drew worldwide attention to conditions on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Two occupiers were killed.
Q 24Which South Dakota town is home to the 'World's Only Corn Palace'?
Mitchell
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.
Q 25The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally began in 1938 as a small event for riders of which motorcycle brand?
Indian
Founder Clarence 'Pappy' Hoel owned the local dealership and formed the Jackpine Gypsies club. Attendance peaked at an estimated 739,000 in 2015.
Q 26The Lakota name for the Badlands, makȟóšiča, translates literally as what?
Bad land
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.
Q 27Which endangered animal, once thought extinct, was reintroduced to the wild in Badlands National Park?
The black-footed ferret
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.
Q 28Wind Cave, protected by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, holds what distinction?
First cavern anywhere given full federal protection
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.
Q 29Jewel Cave near Custer is named for what?
Calcite crystals lining its walls
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.
Q 30The Homestake Mine at Lead, once the largest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere, was converted into what?
An underground physics laboratory
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.