When it came time to name the town, some residents wanted to name it Stonewall after the Confederate Civil War General, Stonewall Jackson. However, a large number of Union veterans were living in the town and voted to name it after General George Armstrong Custer instead.

The mountain goats seen in the Black Hills can be traced back to six goats given to Custer State Park by the country of Canada.  The goats escaped their pens in the park and ended up taking residence at Mount Rushmore instead.

The stronghold unit of Badlands National Park was used by WWII pilots as a gunnery range from 1942 to 1945. That section of the park remains largely undeveloped and some unexploded ordinances remain in the area.

President Calvin Coolidge came to Custer State Park for a short vacation in the summer of 1927. Coolidge enjoyed the Black Hills so much he ended up extending his stay for two months and ran the country from his room at the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park.

In 2007’s “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” treasure hunters found the lost city of gold at Sylvan Lake. The lake was portrayed to be behind Mount Rushmore, but it’s really five miles away in Custer State Park.

Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park are two of the locations where the endangered Black Footed Ferret was reintroduced into the wild.

The first T. Rex, named STAN after his discoverer, was found in the spring of 1987 in some outcrops near the town of Buffalo.  STAN is on display at the Black Hills Museum of Natural History.   In 1990, not far from where they found STAN, paleontologists uncovered another complete and well-preserved T.Rex near the town of Faith. T. Rex SUE stands 13-feet high at the hips and 42-feet long from head to tail.  SUE has a permanent home in the Field Museum in Chicago.

Wind Cave National Park became the seventh national park in the United States in 1903. Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is the first park protected by Congress. Devils Tower National Monument is the first national monument in the country.

South Dakota, once part of Dakota Territory, was granted statehood on November 2, 1889—the same day as North Dakota. It’s not known which state was admitted first since papers were shuffled and the name hidden when President Benjamin Harrison signed the proclamations.

Belle Fourche, located in the northern Black Hills, was officially named as the Geographic Center of the United States in 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were added as the 49th and 50th states.