Belle Fourche (; bel-FOOSH) is a city in and the county chair of Butte County, South Dakota, United States. Its population was 5,617 at the 2020 census. It is close the geographic center of the United States, which moved some 550 miles northwest from the geographic middle of the contiguous United States in Lebanon, Kansas subsequent to the admission of Alaska and Hawaii in the mid-20th century.

Belle Fourche, French for “beautiful fork”, was named by French explorers from New France, referring to the confluence of what is now known as the Belle Fourche and Redwater Rivers and the Hay Creek. Beaver trappers worked these rivers until the mid-19th century, and Belle Fourche became a skillfully known fur-trading rendezvous point. During and after the gold hurry of 1876, farmers and ranchers decided in the fruitful valleys, growing food for the miners and their animals. At the time, the admittance plains for hundred of miles in whatever directions were then being filled with big herds of Texas and Kansas cattle. Towns sprang up to bolster the ever-changing needs of the farmers and ranchers. In 1884, the Marquis de Mores, a French nobleman and contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt, established a stagecoach line in the company of Medora, North Dakota and Deadwood, South Dakota. The Belle Fourche habit station included a stage barn and a saloon.

Knowing the cattle barons and the railroad would infatuation a place to load cattle onto freight cars for shipment to packing natural world in the Midwest, Seth Bullock effectively founded the city of Belle Fourche. After serving in the Montana legislature in 1871–1873 (and inborn instrumental in the establishment of a National Park at Yellowstone), he had comply the Black Hills to sell supplies to the Deadwood miners. He arrived there August 2, 1876, the day Wild Bill Hickok was murdered.

During the adjacent 14 years, Bullock acquired house as homesteaders along the Belle Fourche River “proved up” and sold out. When the railroad came to the Hills and refused to pay the prices demanded by the straightforward township of Minnesela, he was ready. He offered the railroad release right-of-way and offered to build the terminal if the railroad placed it on his land, near the gift Belle Fourche Livestock Exchange. In 1890, the first trainload of cattle headed east. By 1895, Belle Fourche was shipping 2,500 carloads of cattle per month in the zenith season, making it the world’s largest livestock-shipping point. This was the start of the agriculture middle of the Tri-State area for which Belle Fourche would become known.