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Located in the Black Hills, Keystone was once a mining town and now serves the needs of visitors to the famous Mount Rushmore Memorial. The memorial is world-famous for its portrayal of four US Presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt — and was begun in 1927 taking 12 years to complete. Each head is around 60 feet long from chin to crown, and Lincoln's nose is a massive 18 feet long. In 1939 the Sioux Native Americans decided to create a monument to honor their great heroes too, and instigated the creation of the hugely impressive Crazy Horse Memorial by Korczak Ziolkowski that stands nearby. This enormous sculpture is still a work in progress but aims to be the world's largest when it is eventually finished.

Badlands National Park is also well worth visiting for its spectacularly colored and eroded rock formations, and for its remarkably preserved fossils. Adjacent to the park lies the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the second largest in the USA, where a monument commemorates the massacre of Native Americans by the US Army at Wounded Knee in 1890. Other nearby attractions include the atmospheric Wild West town of Deadwood, Wind Cave National Park, and Custer State Park where elk, bighorn sheep, wild donkeys and bison thrive.