Travel Oracles 50 States: South Dakota
As part of my summer series - Travel Oracles 50 States - I am revisiting each os the fifty American states as an overview on travel culture and history. Today: South Dakota
Joined: The territory that would become South Dakota was added to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. South Dakota was admitted to the Union simultaneously with North Dakota on November 2, 1889, as the 39th and 40th states.
Original Indigenous Peoples: Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota
First Settlers: The first permanent American settlement was established at Fort Pierre by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. White settlement of the territory in the 1800s led to clashes with the Sioux, as some of the lands had been granted to the tribe by an earlier treaty. Nevertheless, the territory was incorporated into the union on November 2, 1889, along with North Dakota.
History moment: In 1874, a military expedition into the Lakota-owned Black Hills led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed the existence of gold. Although the mission violated the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had guaranteed the Sioux rights to their sacred territory and established the Great Sioux Reservation, the area was flooded by thousands of miners, triggering the Black Hills War of 1876. The original design for Mount Rushmore National Memorial included Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt from head to waist, but Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had begun work on the monument in 1927, died before the work was completed, in 1941, and Congress cut off funding as the nation became faced with World War II. A memorial to the Lakota leader Crazy Horse in South Dakota’s Black Hills is designed to be the largest statue in the world when it is completed. Dedicated by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear on June 3, 1948, the mountain carving will extend 563 feet high and 641 feet long. In June 1998, Crazy Horse’s 87-foot head was completed. On February 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied a trading post at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in protest over corruption within the Oglala Lakota’s Tribal Council and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The Siege at Wounded Knee, as it became known, lasted 71 days and resulted in the deaths of two Indians following the daily gunfire between AIM members and federal officers.
Known for: Mount Rushmore (60-foot-tall sculptures of the faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln), the Badlands, and agriculture
Places: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Deadwood
Movie setting: North by Northwest, Badlands, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and the HBO show ‘Deadwood’
Surprising facts: The Crazy Horse Mountain Carving Will Be The Largest Sculpture In The World
Marked by windswept prairies, rugged badlands, and an emerald oasis known as the Black Hills, South Dakota is a state of rugged beauty. The chiseled spires, ragged ridges, and steep-sided canyons of Badlands National Park are awe-inspiring, while the Black Hills, with its imposing peaks and the famed Mount Rushmore monument, attracts sizable crowds in summer. Let’s travel to South Dakota
My Experience: Never been, but have always wanted to see the Badlands. Things to do in South Dakota
Nature: Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park. Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the colossal sculpture in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota
Ranking in US: Per the annual US News report, South Dakota is currently ranked #15 out of 50 in 2021 and #20 in 2019.