SDSouth Dakota Fun Facts

South Dakota holds a mountain carving that pulls more than two million visitors a year and a capital city most Americans could not place on a map. Pierre has roughly 14,000 residents, sits on the Missouri River, and is one of the few state capitals with no Interstate running through town.

Facts most people get wrong

• Mount Rushmore was never finished. Gutzon Borglum designed the four presidents carved down to the waist. Work ran from 1927 to 1941, Borglum died that March, the money ran out, and carving stopped in October with the heads alone. The unfinished version is the one on every postcard.
• Crazy Horse Memorial takes no federal money. Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked briefly on Rushmore, started blasting in 1948 at the invitation of Lakota leaders. The foundation has turned down federal funding and runs on admissions and donations, which is a large part of why the carving is still going after more than 75 years.
• Sturgis is a very small town. The August rally brings crowds in the hundreds of thousands to a city of about 7,000. It also did not begin as a party. Clarence Hoel launched it in 1938 as a race meet called the Black Hills Motor Classic.
• The Badlands are not a desert. Those spires were cut by water, not sculpted by drought, and the park protects one of the largest stretches of mixed grass prairie left in the country. Bison, bighorn sheep and black-footed ferrets all live inside it.
• The state is not flat. Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills reaches 7,242 feet, the highest ground in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. It was renamed from Harney Peak in 2016.
• Wall Drug was built on free ice water. Ted and Dorothy Hustead put up highway signs offering free ice water to passing drivers in 1936. The store sits in Wall, a town of under 900 people, and the signs still run for hundreds of miles in either direction.

Records and firsts

• The most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, nicknamed Sue, came out of a hillside near Faith in 1990 after Sue Hendrickson spotted bone in an eroding cliff.
• The Homestake Mine at Lead operated from 1876 to 2002 and was the deepest and largest gold mine in North America. Its tunnels now house the Sanford Underground Research Facility, with physics labs 4,850 feet below the surface.
• Jewel Cave near Custer has more than 200 miles of mapped passages, ranking it among the longest known caves on Earth, and surveyors are still adding to it.
• Mitchell has the only Corn Palace in the world. Since 1892 the building's exterior murals have been rebuilt each year out of corn, grain and native grasses.
• Carving Rushmore removed roughly 450,000 tons of rock across 14 years, and not a single worker died on the job.
• The geographic center of all 50 states sits near Belle Fourche, a designation that dates to 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii joined and pulled the center north and west.

Geography that surprises

• The state runs on two clocks. Counties west of the Missouri River are mostly Mountain time, everything east is Central, so a drive across South Dakota can cost or gain an hour.
• Nobody here says eastern or western. They say East River and West River, and the Missouri is the dividing line for rainfall, ranching, tribal land and voting patterns alike.
• Sioux Falls is closer to Minneapolis, about 240 miles, than it is to Rapid City, about 350 miles. Leaving the state is faster than crossing it.
• The Black Hills are an island of granite and ponderosa pine rising out of the Great Plains, geologically older than the Rockies and completely surrounded by grassland.

Where the name comes from

Dakota is the people's own word, from the Dakota language, generally translated as friend or ally. It names one of the three dialect divisions of the Sioux nation, alongside Lakota and Nakota, and Congress attached it to Dakota Territory in 1861.

The territory split in two in 1889. President Benjamin Harrison did not want either new state claiming seniority, so he shuffled the two admission papers and covered them before signing. No one recorded which he signed first. Alphabetical order broke the tie, making North Dakota the 39th state and South Dakota the 40th.

State basics

Bordering states

Explore further