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When the Census Bureau proclaimed the closing of the American frontier in 1890, one of the last places where it had closed was the southern part of the Dakota Territory, just admitted to the Union in 1889 as the state of South Dakota. For years this land had been the home of the Oglala Sioux, one of the largest Native American tribes, who had built a buffalo hunting civilization by becoming masters of the horses the Spaniards had imported to North America 350 years earlier. It was the Sioux warrior chief Sitting Bull, now buried on a bluff above the Missouri River, who destroyed Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876; it was Oglala Sioux who were the victims at the massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. After half a century of horrifying disease and a decade of defeat, the Sioux were a traumatized people, and still are today, living on reservations with proud traditions but in terrible poverty. They are isolated far from the mainstream economic marketplace, beset by high rates of crime, alcoholism and suicide, with life expectancy and disease rates like those of sub-Saharan Africa. But infant mortality has been reduced and the American Indian population has been growing--by 23% in the 1990s. Indians are in the process of getting a great monument, the late Korczak Ziolkowski's Crazy Horse sculpture, which--when and if finished--will dwarf Mount Rushmore (which was left unfinished itself at the start of World War II).

Less tragic and more successful, though not without its moments of violence, was the whites' settlement of South Dakota. It was a rapid process: the first gold strikes in the Black Hills came in 1876, and soon the mountains swarmed with settlers. Deadwood became a city of 20,000 where Calamity Jane ruled the saloons and Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back while holding two pair--aces and eights. Ranchers, knowing that the buffalo could not be contained by barbed wire fences, massacred them so thoroughly that when Teddy Roosevelt got to the Dakota Territory in 1884, he had a hard time finding one to shoot. It was not long before the railroad came through, and then settlers, many of them German and Scandinavian immigrants recruited by the railroads, had built sodhouses, broken the land and set down enough roots to justify making both the two Dakota states.

Geographically, South Dakota has never entirely filled up. In the 25 years between statehood and World War I, the eastern third of the state, sectioned off Midwestern style into 640-acre square miles, was settled by farmers. But moving westward, before a traveler reaches the Missouri River in the middle of the state, green turns to brown, cultivation grows sparse and then stops; the plains are open grazing land, scarcely touched by the white men who were so eager to establish dominion over them a century ago. The land is punctuated, not by roads meeting every mile at precise angles, but by buttes, gullies and grasslands sweeping to the horizon with no sign of human habitation except the occasional missile silos that once pointed toward the Soviet Union.

South Dakota's political patterns were fairly well set by the early 1900s. Its early settlers were mostly Midwesterners who brought their Republicanism with them. Voters here never had much use for the Non-Partisan League, which caught on in the more Scandinavian soil of North Dakota, and there was never anything here comparable to the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota. But the nature of the farm economy--its dependence on the great railroads and milling companies, and on the vagaries of international markets--meant that South Dakota was subject to periodic farm revolts. It voted for Populists and William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s; it supported the early New Deal; it revolted against the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s by electing a young congressman named George McGovern, then a professor at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, home also of the Corn Palace, built in 1892 and decorated every year with 13 murals using 275,000 ears of corn. South Dakota also shared the isolationist impulse of much of the Great Plains; McGovern's opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s was not a liability here. In the early 1970s, Democrats seemed on the verge of becoming the majority party.

Then South Dakota moved sharply to the Republicans. This began with the angry response to Wounded Knee in 1975. And it was perpetuated by the policies of Republican Governor William Janklow, elected in 1978 and 1982 and then again in 1994 and 1998. It was Janklow who got the legislature to repeal the usury law in 1981 and invited Citicorp to move its credit card operations to Sioux Falls, where they could charge market interest rates and which had no state corporate or personal income taxes, and a literate low-wage work force. The Citibank operation here grew from 50 employees to 3,200 in 2003, replacing the meatpacker John Morrell as the biggest employer; other banks and telemarketing followed; some 9,000 people in the Sioux Falls area work in financial services. And new firms started up, like NordicTrak and Gateway Computer (their executive offices have moved to San Diego but most employees are still in North Sioux City). South Dakotans have proved to be an ideal work force; as Gateway's Ted Waitt says, "A lot of it has to do with the people. It basically gets back to Midwest values … honesty, integrity and loyalty." Some meatpacking plants have closed, but others are manned now by a largely Hispanic work force, recruited from the Southwest and beyond; 40 languages are spoken on the floor of the John Morrell plant in Sioux City. South Dakota has also worked hard to court tourists. The lure of natural attractions in the Black Hills and the huge and varyingly unfinished sculptures of Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial are augmented by such enterprises as gold-panning creeks and gambling casinos in Deadwood and on Indian reservations. And Wall Drug, the 46,000-square foot emporium between the Badlands and Rapid City, snares three-quarters of the freeway traffic.

As a result, South Dakota's population centers have grown, while its farm counties continue to empty out. Metro Sioux Falls grew 13% in the 1980s and 24% in the 1990s--amazing growth in a state which had sometimes lost population between censuses--and Lincoln County, just south of Sioux Falls, was one of the nation's fastest growing counties in the 1990s. Growth has come along counties in the I-29 and I-90 corridors and on Indian reservations. South Dakota still has a low-wage economy, but it also has low unemployment and low housing prices (10% of houses in rural counties are vacant); its residents and those in North Dakota spend less time commuting to work than Americans in any other state. It leads the nation in percentage of home-based businesses. South Dakota has long been thought of as a farm state, but farm counties have been losing population; in the 1990 Census, 11% of the workforce was employed in farming, forestry or fishing but by 2000 that figure had dropped to 8%. Ranching is also important, and it was ranchers in the western and central parts of the state who were hurt most by the drought in summer 2002. There is still some mining here, but it is tapering off; the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead closed down in 2001 after 127 years of operation. Demographically, South Dakota is coming to resemble the Rocky Mountain states, with most people concentrated around a few cities and towns, while vast acreage remains vacant, punctuated with infrequent ranches and resort areas--a landscape that would not have been totally alien to Sitting Bull. South Dakota is not a farm state any more.

Politically, South Dakota continues to vote mostly Republican, but it has several talented Democrats who have had considerable electoral success. It has two Democratic senators, Tim Johnson, elected by narrow margins in 1996 and 2002, and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who won his first race for the House in 1978 by just 139 votes. Democrats' chances here for years were tied to their support of generous farm bills, but today, with the dwindling farm population, their stands on other issues--drought aid, ethanol--have been more important. Low farm prices did nothing to swing South Dakota voters toward Al Gore in 2000; the Republican Congress has continued sending out large sums to farmers as disaster relief. And Republicans hold the governorship, both houses of the legislature and the state's lone House seat. In 2002 South Dakota was the scene of two of the nation's most strenuously contested congressional elections. Tim Johnson held his Senate seat over Congressman John Thune by just 524 votes. Bill Janklow, governor for 16 of the last 24 years, was able to win the House seat by only 53%-46% over 31-year-old Democrat Stephanie Herseth. Personal campaigning is still important here. This is a state where voters expect to meet and talk with the candidates, and with some frequency. In 2004, there may be another hotly contested race here: in early 2003, Thune seemed to be preparing to run for Daschle's Senate seat. Daschle's years of meeting with South Dakota voters will undoubtedly help his candidacy, but South Dakota voters have been willing to reject incumbent senators--Democrat George McGovern in 1980 and Republicans Jim Abdnor in 1986 and Larry Pressler in 1996.