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Historic place

Wind Cave National Park

26611 US Highway 385, Hot Springs, SD

A hole in the prairie that blew a man's hat off in 1881 turned out to be the entrance to the world's first cave ever designated a national park.

📅 1881–present🏛️ National ParkStill hereBuilt 1881
Open on the mapSlide back to 1881
Wind Cave National Park, 26611 US Highway 385, Hot Springs, SD
Boxwork formations in Wind Cave · USGS/USGov, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The story

In 1881 brothers Tom and Jesse Bingham followed a whistling sound to a small hole; the wind rushing out reportedly knocked Tom's hat off — the "breathing" that gave the cave its name. In 1890 the developers hired 16-year-old Alvin McDonald, who mapped miles of passages by candlelight before dying of typhoid at 20 in 1893. On January 9, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt made Wind Cave the seventh national park — the first cave in the world to receive the status. To the Lakota the entrance is Washun Niya, a sacred site in their emergence story.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

It's the first cave anywhere to become a national park (1903), decades before Carlsbad Caverns.
About 95% of the world's known boxwork formations are inside Wind Cave.
The cave "breathes" — air rushes in or out of the entrance with barometric pressure, which is how it was found.

Connected places

St. Louis Coliseum

St. Louis, MO
Theodore Roosevelt

Hyperion Theater

New Haven, CT
Theodore Roosevelt

Temple of Music (Pan-American Exposition)

Buffalo, NY
Theodore Roosevelt

Hotel Schenley (William Pitt Union)

Pittsburgh, PA
Theodore Roosevelt

Black Cat Cafe

San Francisco, CA
Theodore Roosevelt

Bear Butte (Matȟó Pahá)

Sturgis, SD
Lakota

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Hot Springs Historic District

River Street Historic District · 12.8 km away
Boomtown Hot Springs rebuilt its downtown almost entirely out of locally quarried pink sandstone in the 1890s, and that

Evans Plunge

1145 North River Street · 12.8 km away
Businessman Fred "Big Fred" Evans built a wood, iron, and glass pool house over a cluster of warm mineral springs in 189

Battle Mountain Sanitarium

500 North 5th Street · 13.3 km away
Congress built a soldiers' home in Hot Springs specifically so disabled Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans coul

Pioneer Museum

300 North Chicago Street · 13.7 km away
A sandstone schoolhouse built in 1893 to educate all twelve grades of Hot Springs students now holds the town's pioneer-

The Mammoth Site

1800 US Highway 18 Bypass · 14.6 km away
A bulldozer clearing land for a housing subdivision in 1974 broke into a 26,000-year-old sinkhole packed with the bones

Gordon Stockade

US-16A, Custer State Park (near Stockade Lake) · 24.1 km away
Twenty-eight illegal prospectors — including the first white woman known to enter the Black Hills — built this log fort

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Sourceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_Cave_National_Park