Let’s Make Fun of a State: South Dakota

Prairie Means “Meadow”

This is the second in a series. We started badly with “Let’s Make Fun of a State: How About… Michigan?” and now we’ve rushed over the bison drop with this entry. Look, it’s not a great post, but if you stay till the end there is a picture of Cheryl Ladd. That’s worth five minutes of dreck, isn’t it?

Take Me to the River

We start on a sour note. All of South Dakota, with a few exceptions, drains into the Missouri river. So the big river in South Dakota is more closely associated with another state, namely Missouri. To make matters worse, it is the siltation from South Dakota that gives the Missouri its nickname, the “Big Muddy”, so South Dakota fouls the waters for the poor souls downstream. The Missouri is, of course, the largest tributary of the Mississippi. So even if South Dakota could win the Missouri competition its river would still just be a “contributor” to the majesty of another state’s (Mississippi’s) glory and a city on the other end of the country (New Orleans). On the plus side, one of the tributaries of the Missouri in South Dakota is the “Bad” river. Oh, how cool would it be to say “I was raised on the banks of the Bad”?

A Different Kind of Black Gold

You know how poor people sometimes say “we don’t have dirt”? Well, they don’t say that in South Dakota, because South Dakota has 15 inches of topsoil! Of course to get to that topsoil you have to cut through the prairie. Not a big deal today but when the pioneers first got to South Dakota the sod was 12 inches thick… enough to break an iron plow, BUT NOT A MAN. Wait, it’s 2016? Let me amend that … enough to break an iron plow, BUT NOT A MAN OR HIS WIFE. Just kidding! Anyway, those tough pioneer women and men might have been dirt poor but they were soil rich!

The State Bird

The state bird of South Dakota is the ringed necked pheasant. A strange choice because the pheasant isn’t native to South Dakota. The pheasant was introduced from Asia, but it has done very well living off the land in South Dakota. Upon deeper reflection, however, the choice of the pheasant makes perfect sense. The Scandinavians and Germans who settled the state weren’t natives either, but they, until recently, have done pretty well living off the land of South Dakota.

The State Insect

The state bird isn’t the only alien species with official South Dakota status. The state insect is the honeybee, which was imported from Europe. That’s not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that the rationale for the honeybee being the state insect is that beekeeping is an important industry in South Dakota. That may be true, but South Dakota produces less than half of the honey that North Dakota does AND NORTH DAKOTA DOESN’T HAVE A STATE INSECT.

What Is Native to South Dakota?

If I asked you what is native to South Dakota I know what you would say… Sioux Indians and bison. You’d be right, even though the Sioux didn’t move into South Dakota from central Minnesota until the second quarter of the 18th century, but you’d be missing the better choice. The most important early adopters of the South Dakota landscape were tyrannosaurs. One of the most complete fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex, named Stan, was found in South Dakota. There is a native species to be proud of. Who wouldn’t like to claim Tyrannosaurus Rex as their own? Well, South Dakotans for one. The state fossil of South Dakota is a… Triceratops.

Other Natives of South Dakota I

As we mentioned, South Dakota was, and still largely is, Sioux Territory. It was home of the Mandans. The Mandans were a unique group of folks. They were of Siouan linguistic stock but they lived in settled villages, hunted buffalo seasonally, grew corn, squash and pumpkins and constructed “bull boats” to ride around in rivers. Many white observers thought Mandan culture was one of the richest on the plains. They were decimated by recurring epidemics of small pox and cholera. I don’t think there are any Mandans left.

Natives of South Dakota II

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was a native of South Dakota. He won the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, “a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very high velocities without the use of high voltages”. He also helped in the development of the Atomic Bomb. Element 103, lawrencium (Lr), was named after him. We won’t mention that he moved out of state after graduating from the University of South Dakota. If you asked him what his favorite bird was he undoubtedly would have said the “ringed necked pheasant”.

Natives of South Dakota III

South Dakota also has a large population of Hutterites. Hutterites are Anabaptists, like Mennonites and Old Order Amish. They live on collective farms called Bruderhof and are strict pacifists. During World War I many Hutterites fled to Canada to escape persecution in the United States. Many came back. Isn’t that weird? Why would you come back? Oh, yea… the whole time they were in Canada they missed the pheasants.

Wounded Knee

It turns out that there are a lot of people committed to the South Dakota soil. Chief among them are the Sioux. In the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 the United States Government agreed to “abandon the Bozeman Trail and guarantee the Sioux exclusive possession of the area in South Dakota west of the Missouri River.” We didn’t quite live up to that guarantee. Instead the Sioux got the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian Reservations. I’ve been to Pine Ridge because I wanted to go to Wounded Knee, the place where, after being almost completely disarmed, 200 Sioux men, women, and children were killed by U.S. troops in 1890. It is a spooky place. The 15 inches of topsoil hasn’t yet absorbed the blood of those people.

The Faces, The Places!

We didn’t just take Black Hills from that the Sioux consider sacred, we also carved the faces our Presidents in them. It’s hard to construct a hypothetically equivalent act, though ISIS dynamiting Palmyra might come close. But that’s just destruction. We also built a monument to some of the destroyers. Maybe the ISIS guys sack Rome, turn St. Peter’s into a mosque, and cover the sistine chapel with verses from the Koran. Maybe that doesn’t work… and hey, I don’t want to pound this Indian drum too hard. The real sacrilege in the Black Hills may be the Mt. Rushmore gift shop.

And the Mount Rushmore is, even by the standards of giant western national park gift shops, one of the very best! Really! YOU CAN GET EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER WANT WITH MT. RUSHMORE ON IT. They even have Mt. Rushmore slap bracelets!

Speaking of Politics

South Dakota is a Republican State, but they used to have a tradition of electing liberals to Congress. One of those liberals was George McGovern. I am thankful to South Dakota for giving us George McGovern. It would have been nice if the people from his own state had voted for him in the election of 1972, but perhaps just giving us the candidate was enough. George McGovern was all South Dakota. His 1978 autobiography was entitled Grassroots. Get it? If not, you haven’t been reading.

What About Fracking?

That’s North Dakota

What About Famous People From SoDak?

There are many. The South Dakotans among you know these already:

Why Did You End This So Abruptly?

It’s South Dakota, once you talk about the prairie, the river, and Cheryl Ladd there isn’t really that much more to say. I would be scared to get backlash from South Dakotans, but, you know, there really aren’t that many of them. Maybe next time I will make fun of California.