Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Custer, SD
Custer County's former courthouse preserves courtroom fixtures, jail spaces and collections tied to the Black Hills gold rush. The old civic building's cells and period rooms give it a stronger sense of place than collections relocated into a purpose-built museum.
Deadwood, SD
This 1930 museum preserves some of the Black Hills' strangest artifacts, including the mysterious Thoen Stone, a large gold nugget and a rare plesiosaur specimen. Its collection gives context to Deadwood's gold-rush mythology while retaining the oddities that made early regional museums memorable.
Chamberlain, SD
The museum presents Northern Plains history and contemporary Lakota, Dakota and Nakota culture through artifacts, art and interpretation. The collection is especially useful as cultural context for travelers visiting Indigenous historic and sacred sites elsewhere in the state.
Sturgis, SD
Known as Mato Paha to the Lakota and Noahvose to the Cheyenne, Bear Butte is sacred to numerous Indigenous nations and remains an active place of prayer and ceremony. Visitors must stay respectful, leave offerings undisturbed and not photograph prayer cloths or tobacco ties.
Badlands National Park, SD
The main Badlands visitor center includes paleontology exhibits and a working fossil preparation lab where visitors can sometimes watch park staff prepare specimens recovered from the surrounding formations. It connects the surreal Badlands landscape directly with the extinct animals preserved inside its rocks.
Rapid City, SD
Two original sections of the Berlin Wall stand outdoors with tank traps and interpretive panels in Memorial Park. Finding physical pieces of one of Europe's most famous Cold War barriers in western South Dakota makes the exhibit an unexpectedly strong historical oddity.
Keystone, SD
Visitors descend into a nineteenth-century Black Hills gold mine where hand drilling, blasting and narrow underground workings are interpreted on guided tours. The preserved mine provides an unusually direct look at the physical environment behind the region's gold-rush history.
Lead, SD
Displays interpret the machinery, geology and underground labor of the Homestake era, including a recreated mine experience beneath the museum. It is one of the best places to understand the industrial system that hollowed out the hills below Lead for more than a century.
Hot Springs, SD
Thousands of acres south of Hot Springs provide protected range for wild mustangs and other horses. Access to the herds is controlled and tours require advance arrangements; visitors should use the official visitor center and never drive into sanctuary lands without authorization.
Hartford, SD
Buffalo Ridge Ghost Town is a quirky roadside Old West display near the Buffalo Ridge travel stop, with recreated frontier buildings and weathered western scenes. It is more roadside attraction than authentic abandoned settlement, making it a fun photo stop for travelers interested in kitschy ghost-town imagery.
Pine Ridge, SD
The arts center holds a major collection of historical and contemporary Lakota art and supports hundreds of Native artists through exhibitions and sales. Its new facility opened in 2026 on the Maȟpíya Lúta campus, making it an important living cultural stop rather than a collection separated from the community it represents.
Spearfish, SD
A federal fish hatchery established in 1896 preserves old hatchery buildings, railcars, fisheries equipment and a national archive devoted to fish-culture history. The combination of working ponds and specialized historical machinery makes it considerably stranger than a conventional nature center.
Deadwood, SD
The museum preserves stagecoaches, firearms, wagons, rodeo material and objects tied to Deadwood's frontier mythology. Its large vehicle collection and emphasis on the city's deliberately revived Wild West identity make it more unusual than a standard town museum.
De Smet, SD
Members of the Ingalls family are buried in this quiet prairie cemetery west of De Smet. The graves provide a real-world endpoint to people and events heavily fictionalized and mythologized through the Little House books and later television adaptations.
Wall, SD
This deceptively ordinary-looking fenced compound once controlled a flight of ten Minuteman nuclear missiles, with the actual launch control center buried 31 feet underground. Visitors may walk to the gate, while entry and underground access require a reserved ranger-led tour.
Wall, SD
A preserved Minuteman II missile remains visible beneath a glass enclosure inside its original launch silo. The quiet prairie setting makes the scale of the former nuclear missile field particularly unsettling.
Rapid City, SD
A movie theater has operated on this downtown site for generations, preserving an increasingly uncommon piece of small-city cinema history. Its old auditorium and long entertainment history make it a worthwhile architectural stop in Rapid City's historic core.
Hot Springs, SD
A naturally warm mineral spring feeds a large indoor pool first developed as a commercial plunge in 1890. The constant flow of spring water links a modern recreation facility directly to the geology that gave Hot Springs its name.
Pickstown, SD
Stone and brick remains mark the Missouri River military post established in 1856 and later abandoned. The ruined chapel and foundations survive beside the modern Fort Randall Dam, placing frontier military history against enormous twentieth-century infrastructure.
Lake City, SD
More than a dozen surviving nineteenth-century military buildings stand at a remote former frontier post on the Coteau des Prairies. Barracks, officers' quarters and support structures create one of the state's most complete preserved military complexes.
Badlands National Park, SD
A short boardwalk displays replicas and interpretation of extinct animals found in the White River Badlands. It connects the bizarre exposed landscape with the oreodonts, ancient mammals and other fossils that made the region scientifically famous.
Galena, SD
Mining booms and busts left Galena with scattered historic buildings and remnants of a once-busier Black Hills settlement. The community is not entirely abandoned, so visitors should stay on public roads and treat occupied or posted structures as private property.
Sioux Falls, SD
Blood Run is one of the largest known Oneota cultural sites in the upper Midwest and was a major Indigenous settlement, gathering place and trade center centuries before modern Sioux Falls. The visitor center and trails interpret a landscape whose archaeological importance is easy to miss from the surrounding suburbs.
Watertown, SD
Built in the nineteenth century, the restored opera house contains performance, gallery and event spaces above downtown Watertown. Its survival preserves the elaborate kind of upper-floor entertainment venue that once appeared in prairie commercial blocks.
