Wasta, South Dakota

Wasta is a Lakota word. The name comes from the Lakota word wašté, meaning good. It is a modest name for a modest place on the Cheyenne River, in Pennington County.

A railroad came through, and a post office opened in nineteen oh seven. The town was incorporated in nineteen thirty. The railroad handled freight and passenger traffic until the line declined in the mid-twentieth century. Wasta sits today between the Badlands to the east and the Black Hills to the west, a handful of buildings on the high plains alongside Interstate Ninety, where travelers pass without stopping through a landscape that holds, in its Lakota name, a quiet insistence on meaning something good.