Rapid Creek is a tributary of the Cheyenne River, approximately 86 mi (138 km) long, in South Dakota in the United States.
It rises in southwestern South Dakota, in the Black Hills National Forest in the Black Hills in Pennington County. It flows east, is joined by Castle Creek, past Silver City and through the Pactola Reservoir. Emerging from the Black Hills, it flows through Rapid City, past Farmingdale, and joins the Cheyenne approximately 13 mi (21 km) southwest of Wasta.
The Rapid Creek is most noted for the Black Hills flood of 1972, in which 238 people perished in Rapid City and the Black Hills. Since the flood, a flood plain has been established throughout the city making development along the banks inconsiderable.
Famous quotes containing the words rapid and/or creek:
“In a time of confusion and rapid change like the present, when terms are continually turning inside out and the names of things hardly keep their meaning from day to day, it’s not possible to write two honest paragraphs without stopping to take crossbearings on every one of the abstractions that were so well ranged in ornate marble niches in the minds of our fathers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)