Every Tourist Needs A Trap

Sixty or more miles before you reach it, you start seeing signs for Wall Drug. Wall Drug Store is probably South Dakota's oldest tourist trap.

In 1931 Dorothy and Ted Hustead bought in the only drugstore in the little town of South Dakota. Ted was a pharmacist from Nebraska and he and Dorothy were newlyweds. Business was really bad until Dorothy came up with the idea to offer free ice water to travelers. The rest, as they say, is history.


Today Wall Drug is more than a pharmacy. There's a mall with a main street built like a western town. Buildings are made of timber from the area and old brick. The street is made of Cheyenne River Rock. There's a western art gallery in the dining room with original oil paintings. A great bookstore with an extensive collection of books on the area. There's a life-sized carving of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made from a 187-year-old cedar tree. There's  an area where you can pan for gold. There are hundreds of historical photos of the area including a whole section of Indian portraits. Then there are the stagecoach replicas, the giant T-Rex, the jackalope, etc. etc.

Wall still gives away 5000 glasses of free ice water every day. And, coffee is 5¢.

Before you turn up your snobby noses, in his 1989 book, The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson wrote, "It's an awful place, one of the world's worst tourist traps, but I loved it and I won't have a word said against it." 

We loved it, too.

Kathryn