SDSouth Dakota State Symbols

Mount Rushmore gave South Dakota its official nickname. The four presidential heads carved into a Black Hills granite face between 1927 and 1941 became the state's defining image, and the legislature eventually wrote "The Mount Rushmore State" into law, retiring the older "Sunshine State" tag that South Dakota had been sharing with Florida. The rest of the list is less monumental and more revealing: a game bird shipped in from China, a named prairie soil, and a skewered meat snack all carry official standing under South Dakota law.

Official state symbols

The pasque flower carries its own attached motto, "I Lead," a nod to the fact that it pushes up through the prairie before almost anything else in spring. The ring-necked pheasant was not a South Dakota native at all: birds released in the state around the turn of the twentieth century took hold in the corn and grassland country so completely that pheasant hunting became a fall economy of its own.

What is on the South Dakota state flag

The flag is a field of sky blue with the state seal at the center, ringed by a golden sun whose triangular rays radiate outward. "South Dakota" arcs above the seal in gold and "The Mount Rushmore State" runs below it. State historian Doane Robinson, the same man who first proposed carving figures into the Black Hills, campaigned for a flag, and the design adopted in 1909 came from Ida Anding McNeil, who worked in his office. That original version was double sided, with the blazing sun on one face and the seal on the other, which made it slow and costly to manufacture. A 1963 revision combined both elements onto a single side. The wording below the seal originally read "The Sunshine State"; in 1992 the legislature replaced it with "The Mount Rushmore State" so the flag matched the nickname the tourism office was already using.

The state seal and the motto

The seal is a working landscape rather than an allegory, and the state constitution spells out its contents. A farmer plows behind a team of horses. Cattle graze on the right. On the left a smelter with a smoking chimney stands for the Black Hills mining industry that followed the 1874 gold rush into the Homestake country. A steamboat moves along the Missouri River in the middle distance, hills rise behind it, and a field of corn fills the foreground. The banner across the design reads "Under God the People Rule," the state motto, and the border carries the words "State of South Dakota, Great Seal, 1889."

Symbols that surprise people

• Chislic is the official state nosh. Cubes of skewered fried meat, usually mutton or beef, arrived with German Russian immigrants in the southeastern counties and won the designation in 2018.
• Fry bread is the state bread, adopted in 2005 and tied to the state's nine tribal nations.
• Kuchen is the state dessert, another German Russian import, a custard and fruit cake still sold by the pan in small-town bakeries.
• Houdek is the state soil. It is a deep, dark, silty prairie soil formed under grassland, and South Dakota named a specific soil series official in 1990.
• Black Hills gold is the state jewelry, recognizable by its grape leaf and cluster motifs worked in green and pink gold alloys.

Neighbouring states' symbols

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