About South Dakota

South Dakota, like North Dakota, takes its name from the Dakota people, one of the three divisions of the Great Sioux Nation. "Dakota" means "allies" or "friends" in the Lakota-Dakota-Nakota language. The Dakota Territory was organized by Congress in 1861. After years of debate over whether to admit the territory as one state or two, Congress chose to divide it and admitted North Dakota and South Dakota simultaneously on November 2, 1889. South Dakota is home to Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the Black Hills, and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the largest reservations in the United States. The Black Hills, sacred to the Lakota Sioux, were seized by the federal government after gold was discovered there in 1874, a taking the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 to have been illegal.

South Dakota is a state of dramatic contrasts. East of the Missouri River, it is flat, fertile, and agricultural , an extension of the Corn Belt where Sioux Falls has quietly grown into one of the most economically dynamic mid-sized cities in the country. West of the Missouri, everything changes: the land rises into pine-covered hills, volcanic rock formations, and the alien terrain of the Badlands, a landscape that looks like nothing else on earth.

South Dakota's history is defined by the collision between westward American expansion and the Lakota Sioux, one of the most powerful Indigenous nations in North America. The Black Hills, seized in violation of a federal treaty, became the site of Mount Rushmore, one of the most iconic images in American history. The land claim dispute that followed produced a $1.3 billion uncollected court judgment that the Lakota refuse to accept because they want the land, not the money.

Modern South Dakota is reliably Republican, increasingly prosperous in Sioux Falls, home to a powerful credit card industry, and slowly grappling with the legacy of Wounded Knee and the ongoing poverty of its reservation communities, which remain among the most economically distressed places in the United States.