The Mount Rushmore State

A History of South Dakota

A Sweeping History Of The Great State Of South Dakota

South Dakota is a place of stark contradictions: carved presidential faces gazing out from sacred Lakota land, booming cities surrounded by emptying small towns, and a frontier mythology that obscures as much as it illuminates. In this sweeping narrative history, the Mount Rushmore State emerges not as a forgotten flyover territory but as a crucible where the central tensions of the American experience have played out with unusual clarity and force.

From the Paleo-Indian hunters who stalked mammoths across the ancient prairie to the tech workers now reshaping Sioux Falls, from the golden age of Lakota horse culture to the tragedy of Wounded Knee and the ongoing struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, The Mount Rushmore State tells the full story of this remarkable place. It follows French fur traders and Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, rides with the prospectors who flooded into Deadwood, and walks beside the homesteaders who broke the sod only to see their dreams turn to dust in the 1930s. It reckons honestly with broken treaties and cultural destruction while honoring the resilience of those who refused to surrender.

Authoritative yet accessible, tragic yet hopeful, The Mount Rushmore State reveals how one place on the northern Great Plains can illuminate the larger American story—its violence and its vitality, its injustices and its enduring promise. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not just South Dakota, but the nation itself.