South Dakota

The other half of the split, and the state where the Indian wars ended. The Black Hills were guaranteed to the Lakota in perpetuity by the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, gold was found there in 1874, and the war that followed produced the Little Bighorn and then the confinement of the Lakota to reservations. Wounded Knee Creek in December 1890 is where soldiers killed around three hundred Lakota, most of them unarmed, in the last large killing of the plains wars; the same site was occupied by the American Indian Movement for seventy-one days in 1973. The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the hills had been taken unlawfully, and the compensation has never been accepted. Mount Rushmore was carved into those hills between 1927 and 1941, which is why it is contested ground. Homestake at Lead was the largest and deepest gold mine in the western hemisphere and now houses a neutrino laboratory. The state rewrote its usury laws in 1980 to attract credit card operations to Sioux Falls. Pierre is the capital and one of the smallest. Badlands and Custer are its best-known parks. Sioux Falls is the largest city by a wide margin. The Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948, is still unfinished and will be far larger than Rushmore. Nine reservations cover a large part of the state. The Missouri River divides it into East River and West River, terms residents use constantly. Pheasant hunting is a significant seasonal economy. The Homestake laboratory detected the first solar neutrinos, work that later won a Nobel prize.

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