Relocating to South Dakota?

Enjoy your adventure as you visit the best South Dakota relocation resource available today.

Before you start your journey, take a minute and review what makes South Dakota a great place to work and play.

What makes South Dakota real estate worthwhile?

From the rough-hewn relief of the Black Hills to the gently undulating grasslands of the eastern prairies, South Dakota offers a landscape of dramatic contrasts. The low, rolling hills of the state’s eastern quarter are dotted with glacial lakes and ponds and rimmed in places by steep escarpments. A vast stretch of the Great Plains unfolds across most of the western two-thirds of the state, split into two distinct regions by the Missouri River as it flows from north to south through the middle of South Dakota. The prairies east of the Missouri have been smoothed by ages of glacial friction. To the west, the plains are broken by deep river valleys, jagged canyons, and abrupt, flat-topped buttes that rise to heights of 150 meters (500 feet) or more. Located in this part of South Dakota, between the town of Castle Rock and the state’s western boundary, is the geographical center of the United States.

It was the discovery of gold that brought hordes of treasure hunters to the Black Hills in 1874. Before that, settlement of what is now South Dakota had been slow and sporadic. Among the region’s earliest known inhabitants were hunters and foragers who had lived on the Great Plains for millennia. Sometime after 250 BC they began to cultivate maize, make pottery, and construct burial mounds. The descendants of these people, the Arikara and the Cheyenne, were joined in the 1700s by the Sioux. Europeans did not settle permanently in the area until 1817, and from then until the 1874 gold strike, only trappers, fur traders, and a few intrepid farmers dared to make their homes within the isolated reaches of the Dakota Territory.

By the late 1800s, a period of aggressive settlement known as the Great Dakota Boom bred raucous mining towns and colorful frontier characters such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Unfortunately, the sudden influx of settlers also drove Native Americans to a series of violent uprisings that culminated in the tragedy of Wounded Knee—an 1890 massacre in which federal troops killed as many as 370 Sioux men, women, and children.

Today most members of the Great Sioux Nation live on one of nine reservations spread across the state, making up about 7 percent of the state population. One way in which the Sioux are attempting to overcome the poverty that troubles their community is with a growing collection of museums, visitor centers, and other attractions that celebrate their contributions to the history and culture of South Dakota.

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