Black Hills

Mountains in western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. They rise out of the Great Plains, 300-400 km/186-248 mi east of the Rocky Mountains front. The Black Hills occupy about 15,500 sq km/6,000 sq mi and rise to 2,207 m/7,242 ft at Harney Peak, South Dakota. The region includes a national forest (area 4,921 sq km/1,900 sq mi) and Mount Rushmore, which has the faces of four former presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt) carved into a granite cliff (height 1,745 m/5,725 ft).

The Black Hills are the source of one of the richest gold-mines in the USA, and a wide variety of other minerals are also mined here. The Black Hills were once part of a Sioux reservation, but when gold was discovered here in 1874 an invasion of miners took place, forcing the Sioux off their sacred land. Near Mount Rushmore is the even larger mountain carving of Sioux leader Crazy Horse, started in 1948 and still unfinished.