SDSouth Dakota Famous People

Four presidents on a mountain, none of them from here

South Dakota spent the years between 1927 and 1941 blasting Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into a granite face in the Black Hills, and has never sent a single person of its own to the White House. It came close twice, and lost both times to Richard Nixon. Hubert Humphrey was born in Wallace in 1911 and grew up over his father's drugstore in Doland before the family gave up on the drought years and left for Minnesota. He served as vice president from 1965 to 1969 and lost the 1968 election by less than a point of the popular vote. George McGovern was born in Avon in 1922, raised in Mitchell, flew thirty-five bomber missions over Europe, taught history at Dakota Wesleyan, and held a Senate seat from 1963 to 1981. In 1972 he carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia and nothing else. Gutzon Borglum, who designed the carving and ran the drilling crews, was born in Idaho Territory and died in March 1941 with the mountain unfinished. His son Lincoln declared the job complete that October.

Lakota names that outlasted the treaties

Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa leader who would not sign away the Black Hills, was born around 1831 near the Grand River in what is now northern South Dakota, and was killed on that same river on December 15, 1890, by tribal police sent to arrest him. Two weeks later the Seventh Cavalry killed roughly 250 Lakota, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Russell Means was born at Pine Ridge in 1939 and came back in 1973 to lead the American Indian Movement's seventy-one day occupation of that same ground. Two decades later he played Chingachgook opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. Vine Deloria Jr., born in Martin in 1933 into a Yankton Dakota family of Episcopal clergy, published Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969 and changed the vocabulary a generation used to argue about federal Indian policy. Billy Mills grew up at Pine Ridge, orphaned by the age of twelve, and arrived at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics unknown to the bookmakers. He outkicked the world record holder over the last hundred metres of the 10,000 and is still the only American man ever to win that race.

Canton, Bridgewater, Eureka and the export trade

Ernest Lawrence was born in Canton in 1901 to Norwegian immigrant schoolteachers, sketched out a circular particle accelerator in 1929, had the first working cyclotron running at Berkeley two years later, and took the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939. Two national laboratories carry his name, and so does element 103, lawrencium. Sparky Anderson was born in Bridgewater in 1934 and moved to Los Angeles at eight; he managed Cincinnati to World Series titles in 1975 and 1976 and Detroit to one in 1984, the first manager to win in both leagues. Al Neuharth, born in Eureka in 1924, ran Gannett and launched USA Today in 1982 over the scorn of most of the newspaper business. Adam Vinatieri, born in Yankton in 1972, won four Super Bowls, two of them on his own last-second kicks, and retired as the highest scoring player in NFL history. Becky Hammon grew up in Rapid City, went undrafted, made six WNBA All-Star teams, and in 2014 became the first woman hired as a full-time assistant coach in the NBA. Brock Lesnar was raised on a dairy farm near Webster and won the NCAA heavyweight wrestling title for Minnesota in 2000.

Borrowed, not born

Wild Bill Hickok rode into Deadwood in July 1876 and was shot in the back of the head at a poker table on August 2, holding the two pair that the game has called a dead man's hand ever since. Calamity Jane is buried beside him at Mount Moriah. Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Wisconsin, but the family claim at De Smet supplied the settings for The Long Winter and Little Town on the Prairie, and the town still stages pageants on the original ground. Bob Barker was born in Washington state and raised on the Rosebud Reservation, where his mother taught school. Tom Brokaw was born in Webster in 1940 and grew up in Yankton, following the dam projects his father worked on for the Army Corps of Engineers, then anchored NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004. Cheryl Ladd came from Huron and January Jones from Sioux Falls. Mary Hart grew up in Sioux Falls and hosted Entertainment Tonight for twenty-nine years.

Why the list looks the way it does

Two patterns run through it. The first is the reservations. Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Standing Rock have produced more nationally known figures per resident than any comparable stretch of the state. The second is departure. Almost everyone above left: Lawrence for Berkeley, Humphrey for Minneapolis, Anderson for Los Angeles, Brokaw for New York. Fewer than a million people live across the seventeenth largest land area in the country, and for most of the state's history the route to a national career ran through a bigger city somewhere else. The clearest exceptions are political. McGovern kept his house in Mitchell, and Tom Daschle, born in Aberdeen in 1947, rose to Senate majority leader in 2001 while never leaving the South Dakota rolls.

Famous people from neighbouring states

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