How the Black Hills Sold Themselves to America
The Black Hills did not become a vacation country by accident. For all the talk of scenery selling itself, the region’s reputation was built deliberately, by men and women who understood that a beautiful landscape only fills hotels if travelers have heard of it and can find their way there. The story of Black Hills tourism is partly a story of granite and pine, and partly a story of advertising.
In the first decades after settlement, the Hills were known mostly for gold. Deadwood, Lead, and the mining camps drew people who came to work, not to look. That began to change in the early twentieth century, as the automobile gave ordinary families the means to travel for pleasure and as a network of improved roads reached into the mountains. Local boosters saw the opportunity. If the railroads had once carried ore out, the new highways could carry tourists in.
Roads and a reason to come
Much of the early groundwork was political. Peter Norbeck, the governor and later senator whose name runs through so much of this history, pushed for the scenic highways and the state park that gave visitors something to drive toward. The Needles Highway and Iron Mountain Road were laid out with the traveler’s eye in mind, framing views and threading tunnels in ways that no purely practical engineer would have bothered with. Custer State Park gave the region a managed wilderness with lodges and a buffalo herd.
The single largest draw arrived in stone. The carving of Mount Rushmore, begun in the late 1920s and finished on the eve of the Second World War, gave the Black Hills a destination of national weight. People who had never considered a trip to South Dakota now had a reason to plan one. Rapid City, sitting at the eastern gateway, became the natural base from which to reach the mountain and everything around it.
The roadside between
What grew up along the highways was its own kind of industry. Once families were driving the long miles across the plains and up into the Hills, enterprising operators gave them places to stop. Snake exhibits, gravity illusions, caves wired for electric light, animal parks, and trading posts heavy with souvenirs lined the routes into the mountains. Reptile Gardens began as a roadside snake show and grew into a genuine attraction. The Cosmos Mystery Area sold the pleasant confusion of a tilted room. Each of these depended on the traffic that Rushmore and the scenic roads brought through, and each in turn gave travelers another reason to linger an extra day.
Promotion tied it all together. Chambers of commerce, highway associations, and the state itself printed brochures, painted billboards across neighboring states, and coined slogans meant to fix the Black Hills in the public mind. The famous corn-decorated landmark at Mitchell and the relentless signage that pulled travelers toward Wall on the way west were part of the same impulse: catch the family in the car and convince them the detour was worth it. The “Gateway to the Black Hills” phrase that Rapid City adopted was advertising as much as geography.
A second economy
By the middle of the twentieth century, tourism had become one of the region’s foundations, set alongside ranching, the federal payroll, and what remained of mining. It was a seasonal trade, concentrated in the warm months, and it depended on things the Hills could not fully control, the price of gasoline, the state of the national economy, the weather over a holiday weekend. But it proved durable. Generations of families made the drive, and many of the attractions that opened before the war were still operating, run by the children and grandchildren of their founders, decades later.
What the promoters understood, and what later boosters would repeat in every medium that came along, was that scenery is a product like any other. It has to be packaged, priced, and pointed to. The Black Hills had the raw material in abundance. The achievement, if it can be called that, was in the selling.