Let's Explore South Dakota

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FUN FACTS ABOUT SOUTH DAKOTA


In 1803, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, a real-estate deal that at the time doubled the size of the United States. 


South Dakota is the home of the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota tribes, which make up the Sioux Nation. 


Sculptor Gutzon Borglum began drilling into the 6,200-foot Mount Rushmore in 1927. Creation of the Shrine to Democracy took 14 years and cost a mere $1 million, though it's now deemed priceless. The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln are sculpted into Mount Rushmore the world's greatest mountain carving. 


Custer State Park is home to a herd of 1,500 free-roaming bison. Bison can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds. Historically, the bison played an essential role in the lives of the Lakota (Sioux), who relied on the “tatanka” for food, clothing and shelter.


With more than 82 miles of mapped passages, Wind Cave contains the world’s largest display of a rare formation called “box work.” 


The Crazy Horse mountain carving now in progress will be the world’s largest sculpture (563' high, 641' long, carved in the round).

Badlands National Park consists of nearly 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest, protected mixed grass prairie in the United States. 
 This park contains the world's richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds.


The name "Black Hills" comes from the Lakota words Paha Sapa, which mean "hills that are black." Seen from a distance, these Ponderosa pine-covered hills, rising several thousand feet above the surrounding prairie, appear black. 
 Black Hills National Cemetery "The Arlington of the West" is a final resting place of our nation's veterans. 


The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs contains the largest concentration of Columbian and woolly mammoth bones discovered in their primary context in the world! This National Natural Landmark is the only in-situ (bones left as found) display of fossil mammoths in America.