The venue
The film-set fort, explained
Why the fort outside Rapid City is a 1990 film set and not an army post, where the real fort stood, and what you can see on the boardwalk before supper.
Pick a supper night ↗Quick answer
The fort where the supper is served was built as a film set for the 1990 Western that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it is now run as a tourist attraction near Rapid City. The real army post it portrays stood near Hays, Kansas, from the 1860s until 1889. Before supper you can walk the boardwalk, see the buildings used in the film and watch craftsmen working tin and rope.
A set, not a frontier post
The first thing to know is the simplest. The fort outside Rapid City is not a preserved nineteenth-century army post. It was built as the set for the fort scenes in a 1990 Western and, after filming, was kept and turned into a tourist attraction. The operator calls it an Old West town that began as a movie set, with buildings from the film, reconstructed props and interpretive signs. Read it that way and the evening makes sense: a supper and a show in a frontier town that was made for the screen.
The army post it stands in for
The fort the set portrays was real, and it was a long way from South Dakota. It began in 1865 as Fort Fletcher on the Smoky Hill Trail in western Kansas, was renamed in 1866 after a Union general killed at the Battle of the Wilderness, and moved to its final site near Hays in 1867. It was an important post in the Indian Wars and a base for the 7th Cavalry. The Army abandoned it in 1889, and today it is a state historic site run by the Kansas Historical Society.
The film
The 1990 film tells the story of a Union army lieutenant posted to the far frontier who comes to know a band of Lakota. His posting begins at the Kansas fort, which is why a fort of that name was built on set. Much of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota with English subtitles. The film won seven Academy Awards, Best Picture among them, and became the first Western to win Best Picture since 1931.
Why it was shot here
Most of the film was shot on location in South Dakota between July and November 1989, mainly on private ranches near Pierre and Rapid City, with a few scenes in Wyoming. The locations included Badlands National Park, the Black Hills and the Belle Fourche River area. The open prairie and the dark, pine-covered hills gave the production its frontier, and the fort set was one of the pieces left behind near Rapid City once the cameras moved on.
What you see before supper
Arrive with the pickup and there is time to walk the boardwalk before the supper bell. The operator describes buildings filled with exhibits and artisans at work, and the workshops let you watch tin plates and ropes being made, or try one yourself. Gift shops line the street. There is no set route and no tour leader, so wander at your own pace, take photographs of the frontier fronts, and be under the pavilion when the bell rings.
How to talk about it with children
Children often ask whether the soldiers really lived there. The plain answer is the true one: the buildings were made for a film, the fort it copies was in Kansas, and the people who really lived in these hills long before either were the Lakota, who call the Black Hills Pahá Sápa and hold them sacred. A movie town is a good place to start that conversation, and a supper is a good place to finish it.
Read next: Black Hills day, then supper
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