where was dances with wolves filmed

“Dances with Wolves” was filmed primarily on location in South Dakota, with additional shooting in Wyoming and Kansas.

Main filming locations

• The bulk of the movie was shot on the Great Plains of central South Dakota, especially around the Triple U (Standing Butte) Buffalo Ranch near Fort Pierre.

• Key scenes also used South Dakota landscapes around Rapid City, including Badlands National Park, the Black Hills, Spearfish Canyon, and the Sage Creek Wilderness Area.

Specific places fans visit

• The buffalo hunt and many fort exteriors were filmed at the Triple U Buffalo Ranch outside Pierre, South Dakota.

• Winter camp and mountain scenery shots featured Spearfish Canyon and other parts of the Black Hills in South Dakota, plus some landscape photography in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Other production notes

• Some additional filming and second-unit landscape work took place in Wyoming, notably around Jackson Hole.

• A smaller portion of production used locations in Kansas to stand in for Civil War–era settings, complementing the frontier visuals captured in South Dakota and Wyoming.

TL;DR: When people ask “where was Dances with Wolves filmed,” the concise answer is: mostly on and around the Triple U Buffalo Ranch and other sites in South Dakota’s Badlands and Black Hills, with extra landscape shots from Wyoming and some work in Kansas.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.