11 Things South Dakotans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

South Dakota is the state the rest of America associates with one mountain carved with four faces and otherwise mostly forgets exists, which suits South Dakotans just fine because they have been quietly managing 77,000 square miles of prairie, badlands, and Black Hills wilderness with a population smaller than many American suburbs and absolutely no interest in changing that ratio. The Mount Rushmore State has no income tax, more buffalo than most states have people interested in buffalo, and a relationship with distance and weather that makes the rest of the country’s complaints about commute times look like a rounding error. South Dakota doesn’t need you to understand it. It needs you to close the cattle gate and maybe stop for the world’s largest pheasant statue while you’re at it.

1. Drive across the entire state and consider four hours a normal Tuesday errand

South Dakota is 380 miles wide, sparsely populated outside Sioux Falls and Rapid City, and residents have adjusted their entire concept of distance accordingly. Driving from the eastern part of the state to the Black Hills for a weekend is treated as a completely reasonable plan, not a road trip requiring special preparation. The car has snacks. The gas tank gets filled before leaving, because the next station might be ninety miles away. This is not adventure. This is Tuesday, and South Dakotans have made their peace with it decades ago.

2. Take Mount Rushmore for granted in a way that visitors find genuinely shocking

Mount Rushmore — sixty-foot granite faces of four presidents carved into a mountain in the Black Hills, one of the most recognizable monuments in America, visited by millions every year — is something South Dakotans drive past, point out to visiting relatives, and otherwise regard with the casual familiarity of a landmark that has simply always been there. Locals who work nearby eat lunch with a view of the monument and don’t take photos. Out-of-state visitors stand in genuine awe. South Dakotans appreciate the awe but don’t entirely share it anymore. Familiarity does this, even to a mountain with four presidents on it.

3. Eat chislic at the bar and consider deep-fried cubes of meat on a stick a completely normal bar snack

Chislic — cubes of red meat, traditionally lamb or mutton though beef and venison versions exist, deep-fried or grilled and skewered, seasoned simply with salt or garlic salt — is South Dakota’s official state nosh, a designation made official by the legislature, and it is served in bars and restaurants across the state with the casual confidence of a snack that requires no explanation to anyone who actually lives there. The rest of America has largely never heard of chislic. South Dakota finds this baffling, since chislic is, in their estimation, an obviously excellent food that the rest of the country has simply failed to discover yet.

4. Watch a buffalo roundup like it’s the most important event of the year, because in some towns, it is

The Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup — held every September, when cowboys on horseback drive roughly 1,300 bison across the park’s grasslands to be vaccinated, sorted, and counted — draws thousands of spectators who arrive before dawn to watch a literal herd of buffalo thunder across the prairie. South Dakotans attend with the seriousness of a community event that connects them to the state’s frontier history in a way that feels current rather than reenacted. The buffalo are real. The dust is real. The sound of 1,300 buffalo running is something that registers in your chest before your ears fully process it.

5. Drive past the same Wall Drug billboard for two hundred miles and still stop anyway

Wall Drug — a sprawling roadside attraction in the small town of Wall that grew from a Depression-era drug store offering free ice water to weary travelers into a complex of shops, a chapel, animatronic displays, and a backyard with a giant jackalope, advertised on billboards stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction along I-90 — is regarded by South Dakotans with genuine affection rather than tourist-trap embarrassment. They stop there. They take out-of-state visitors there specifically. The free ice water is still free. South Dakota built one of the most successful roadside attractions in American history out of sheer persistence and a drug store, and they are correctly proud of it.

6. Drive through the Badlands at golden hour and act like this happens to them regularly, because it does

Badlands National Park — a landscape of eroded buttes, spires, and canyons in striped layers of red, orange, and tan, formed over millions of years and looking, at sunset, like the surface of another planet — is a twenty-minute detour for South Dakotans living nearby and an unforgettable bucket-list destination for everyone else. Locals drive through it on the way to somewhere else, glance at light conditions that would stop a National Geographic photographer in their tracks, and continue toward their actual destination. This is not a lack of appreciation. It is the specific casualness that comes from having something extraordinary close enough to see regularly.

7. Take a sincere pride in having no state income tax and mention it within the first few minutes of any economic conversation

South Dakota is one of a handful of states with no personal income tax, and South Dakotans bring this up with the same instinctive pride that other states bring up sports championships. It shapes who moves here, what businesses incorporate here, and a meaningful chunk of casual conversation about why South Dakota is, in their estimation, quietly one of the best-run states in the country. The tax structure is not abstract policy to South Dakotans. It is a lived, felt, regularly mentioned fact of daily financial life.

8. Hold the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally every August and watch their town of 7,000 become a city of half a million

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally — ten days every August when hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists descend on the small town of Sturgis, South Dakota, population around 7,000 — transforms a quiet Black Hills community into one of the largest temporary gatherings in the country, and Sturgis residents prepare for it, profit from it, and tolerate the chaos of it with the practiced rhythm of people who have done this every summer for decades. The noise is enormous. The economic impact is enormous. The contrast between Sturgis in July and Sturgis in August is one of the more dramatic seasonal transformations any American town undergoes voluntarily.

9. Refer to the entire western half of the state as “out west” while still being in South Dakota

South Dakota’s east-west cultural divide runs roughly along the Missouri River, and “out west” — referring to the Black Hills and the area beyond the river — carries a specific cultural and geographic weight for eastern South Dakotans that has nothing to do with leaving the state. Eastern South Dakota is farmland, flat, agricultural, closer in character to Minnesota and Iowa. Western South Dakota is ranching, Black Hills, badlands, and a more genuinely Western identity. South Dakotans navigate this internal divide as casually as they navigate everything else about their enormous state.

10. Maintain genuine, complicated, ongoing relationships with the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations that the rest of America rarely sees clearly

South Dakota contains nine tribal nations and some of the poorest counties in America sitting alongside some of the wealthiest, a juxtaposition rooted in a long and difficult history involving broken treaties, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the ongoing legal and political disputes over the Black Hills, which the Lakota Sioux never ceded and which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 were illegally taken — a ruling the tribes have refused to accept payment for, insisting instead on the return of the land. South Dakotans who live near reservation communities understand this history with an immediacy that the rest of the country, working from textbook summaries, rarely fully grasps. It is not resolved. South Dakota knows this better than almost anyone.

11. Get genuinely upset about North Dakota getting confused for South Dakota, and vice versa, with surprising intensity

South Dakotans have spent their entire lives being asked if they’re “the one with Mount Rushmore” or being told about something that happened in North Dakota as though it happened to them, and the mild, persistent irritation this produces has calcified into a real regional sensitivity. The two Dakotas are different states, with different economies, different landscapes, and different identities, and South Dakotans correct the conflation every single time it happens with the patient, slightly exhausted tone of people who have had this exact conversation more times than should reasonably be necessary in one lifetime.

South Dakota will not be apologizing for its size, its emptiness, its distance from anywhere the rest of America considers important, or its complete indifference to whether you’ve ever thought about it before. It has mountains carved with presidents, a Badlands landscape that looks like nowhere else on Earth, the best chislic you’ve never heard of, a roadside drug store empire built on free ice water, and a history — complicated, unresolved, and very much alive — that deserves more attention than the rest of the country has generally given it. The sunsets over the Badlands turn the whole landscape the color of something you don’t have a word for yet. The silence on the prairie is the kind that fills you up. Come see it. Just remember to fill the gas tank first. The next station might be a while.