Historical Marker · No. 557
Cheyenne River Rest Area
Pennington County · South Dakota
The panel says the Cheyenne River runs just west of here, and that in the early 1880s cattle outfits with herds in the tens of thousands ranged along it. The bank the rest area stands on was then still the Great Sioux Reservation. The 1877 act took everything west of the Cheyenne, and the east side stayed Lakota land until Congress broke up the reservation in 1889. Wasta, across the river, is named, the panel says, by the state historian Doane Robinson from the Lakota word for good. An identical panel stands at the westbound rest area.
What the plaque says
Cheyenne River Rest Area South Dakota's rich western heritage has been remembered along the Inter- state highway system at safety rest areas and tourist information centers. The eight pillars which thrust skyward here merge in the framework of a tipi. the Plains Indian home. The one-by-one and one-half foot concrete lodgepoles rise fifty-six feet in the air and weigh six-and-one-half tons each. The structures were executed in an architectural manner reflecting the spartan lifestyle of the nomadic Lakota (Sioux) Nation. Beneath each tipi are several concrete isosceles triangles, a basic design of the Lakota Nation, set in a pattern to form a thunderbird, another traditional Indian symbol. The building which houses the rest rooms and tourist information center is fashioned after the sod houses and dugouts which dotted the South Dakota prairie during pioneering days. This vast area along the Cheyenne River proved to be suitable cattle country, and in the early 1880's provided range for large cattle outfits with herds numbering tens of thousands. Ranches comparable in size do not exist in the area today. Nearby, on the west side of the Cheyenne, is the town of Wasta, founded in 1906- 07 on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. Wasta was named by Doane Robinson, South Dakota's first state historian, who used the Sioux word for "good". The town is typical of the many prairie communities which survived despite terrible calamities; for Wasta, that was a fire which destroyed its business district in 1914. The Cheyenne River flows just west of this rest area. The two branches of the Cheyenne envelop the Black Hills and provide its drainage into the Missouri River at a point approximately 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of here.
Where it stands
44.06304, -102.43986 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Wall Drug — 11 miA Depression-era drugstore on the edge of the Badlands that survived by painting free ice water on signs along the highway, and never stopped.