Wind Cave National Park

The Lakota called it Washun Niya and considered it sacred ground — the place where their ancestor Tokahe first emerged from the underworld. When white settlers found it in 1881, wind rushing from a ten-inch opening blew one man's hat clean off his head. Established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, Wind Cave became the first cave designated a national park anywhere in the world. Approximately 95 percent of the world's discovered boxwork formations are here. Above ground, one of only four genetically pure, free-roaming bison herds on public lands in North America grazes the prairie.