A Brief History of South Dakota

Front matter

A BRIEF HISTORY

OF

SOUTH DAKOTA

Chapter 1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOUTH DAKOTA

CHAPTER I THE STORY TOLD BY THE ROCKS

It is very easy to read the story of the rocks in South Dakota, for here more than anywhere else the several formations are exposed to view: and we can readily see what must have happened in that time very long ago, before men, or even animals, inhabited the Dakota land. The rock formations can be seen more or less all over the state, but their story is clearly shown especially in that section near the head waters of the White River at the foot of the Black Hills, known as the Bad Lands.

We learn there that in an ancient time a great ocean rolled over South Dakota; that some great convulsion must have occurred deep in the earth which threw up the Black Hills and other western mountains; that the ocean swept over these hills, grinding them up and washing them down across its floor toward the eastern part of the state, thus laying down a formation or stratum now compressed into hard rock which is the lowest of the many formations studied by the geologist. We learn that again and again the rocks and hills were raised up, each time to be washed down by the ocean, each washing making a new stratum, until finally there came a time when the ocean could not overcome the hills and the latter became high and solid earth somewhat as we now know them. In this time the earliest evidences of life appeared, in the form of snails and other low orders of creatures.

Then the ocean seems to have come back and swept down another stratum of soil from the mountain bases, and after it had again subsided came a race of monstrous reptiles, the remains of which are found quite generally over the state wherever the formation of that period is exposed. It is quite certain that at this time South Dakota was in the main a vast steaming swamp, for the climate was tropical, and out of the swamp grew tropical verdure.

For how long the reptiles reigned no one can ever know, but their period was followed by another, in which great animals, much larger than anything now in existence, roamed throughout the land. They have been given hard names by scientific men who study their remains; as titanotheres, brontotheres, and eleotheres. The titanotheres and brontotheres were evidently of the elephant or rhinoceros family, and the eleotheres were giant pigs. While remains of these animals are most common in the Bad Lands, they are found in many other localities, showing that they roamed generally throughout the state. At this time we can be very sure, from the signs which are left, that South Dakota was a great swampy, tropical plain which sloped gently down from the Black Hills on the west to the great central river flowing through the present James River valley, and from this river sloped up to the top of the coteau at the east line of the state.

By this time several agencies were at work which resulted in a great change in the climate of the region. The uplifting of the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains had cut off the warm breezes from the Pacific Ocean, and in the far north vast heaps of ice were being piled up by the almost continual freezing of the frigid climate. These heaps of ice had become so deep that they could not support their own weight, and so began to run or spread out as you may have seen a large lump of dough spread when turned from the kneading pan to the table. When we examine a piece of ice, it seems to be so hard and brittle that it does not seem possible for ice to spread in this way; nevertheless, scientific men have shown beyond doubt that ice does spread when placed under a great weight.

The spreading of this ice sent it down from the north-east until it had run far down into the South Dakota country. It was so thick and heavy that it completely dammed up the valley of the great river, so that its waters became a great lake, lying north of the ice and extending far back into the Rocky Mountains. The ice pushed along until its western edge had traveled as far as the line now occupied by the Missouri River, when it began to melt away. The waters which were dammed up in the upper part of the great valley began to seep about the western edge of the ice, until they ran entirely around it and reached the old bed of the stream below Yankton.

Thus the ice quite changed the surface of South Dakota. Before it came the Grand River extended east from its

A Pass in the Badlands (Washington County)

present course until it reached the great river near where Aberdeen now is. The Cheyenne ran down to Redfield, the Teton or Bad River to Huron, and the White to Mitchell. The great animals, the titanotheres, mastodons, and eleotheres, were destroyed by the ice, and when it had melted away, it left new conditions in climate, soil, and river courses, not greatly different from what exist to-day.

Of the Bad Lands from which much of this story is learned Professor Charles E. Holmes, a poet whom all South Dakotans delight to honor, has written the following verses:—

The Bad Lands

A stillness sleeps on the broken plain, And the sun beats down, with a fiery rain, On the crust that covers the sand that is rife With the bleaching bones of the old world life.

'Tis a sea of sand, and over the waves Are the wind-blown tops of the Cyclops' caves; And the mountain-sheep and the antelopes Graze cautiously over the sun-burnt slopes.

And here in the sport of the wild wind's play A thousand years are as yesterday, And a million more in these barren lands Have run themselves in the shifting sands.

Oh, the struggle and strife and the passion and pain Since the bones lay bleached on the sandy plain, And a stillness fell on the shifting sea, And a silence that tells of eternity!

Chapter 1

CHAPTER II

THE STORY OF THE MOUNDS

When human beings first came to live in the South Dakota country, is now unknown. Whether or not other men lived here before the Indian tribes is not certain. Those who have studied the subject most carefully believe there was no one here before the Indians came. In various localities there are a number of mounds evidently the work of man, but it is believed that they were all built by Indians.

All along the Missouri River, at the best points for defense, and for the control of the passage of the stream, are mounds that are the remains of fortresses. Their builders must have labored industriously to construct them. It is believed they were built by the ancestors of the Ree Indians, who still occupied the section when white men first came to it. The most important of these mounds are in the vicinity of Pierre, where it is known the Rees had a very large settlement which they abandoned a little more than a century ago. Here are the remains of four very important forts, two on each shore of the river, completely protecting the approach, from above and below, to the extensive region between, which was occupied by the Rees for their homes and gardens.

Along the Big Sioux River, especially in the vicinity of Sioux Falls, and about the lakes on the coteau in Roberts and Marshall counties, are many mounds which chiefly were burial places. From them have been taken many curious stone implements which were used by the Indians in hunting and for domestic purposes before white men brought them implements of iron and steel. Some of these implements are very similar to those used by the Chickasaws and other tribes of the southern United States, and are not at all like the implements of the Ree and Sioux Indians; and this fact leads scientific men to suppose that those southern tribes may at one time have occupied the Dakota country.

The Sioux Indians, too, made many small earthworks, and light stone works, usually on prominent hills and along the streams, but these are chiefly memorials of some striking tribal event. Some of the more important ones are at the hill known as Big Tom, near Big Stone Lake; at Snake Butte, near Pierre; at Medicine Knoll, near Blunt; at Turtle Peak, near Wessington Springs; at Punished Woman's Lake in Codington County; and near Armadale Grove, Ashton, and Huron, on the James River. Almost invariably as a feature of these memorials the image of some bird, animal, or reptile has been made out of small bowlders to indicate the lodge or cult of the person whose deeds are commemorated.

Lewis and Clark, the explorers, found at Bon Homme Island, near Yankton, a very extensive embankment of earth which they measured carefully and described very fully, and which for eighty years afterward was supposed to be proof that the region had been occupied by a prehistoric people. It is now known, however, that this embankment was produced by the action of wind and water.

The South Dakota mounds that were erected by Indians are of less importance than similar mounds found in some other parts of the great Mississippi valley; but they are of great interest as the oldest works of man in our state.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

THE ABORIGINAL INDIANS

The Ree, or Aricara, Indians were possibly the first human inhabitants of South Dakota. These Indians

Ree Indian Lodge

built permanent villages, of earth lodges, and lived by agriculture and the chase. Their homes were always near the Missouri River or some other large stream. Their lodges were built by digging a round hole, like a cellar, in the earth, over which a roof was made by setting up forked timbers, which were covered with poles and brush and then buried in earth. A hole was left in the top of the lodge for ventilation, light, and the escape of smoke. These lodges were very comfortable and do not seem to have been unhealthful. Farming by the Rees was limited to the raising of corn, beans, pumpkins, squashes, and tobacco. Each family had its own tract of ground, fenced off with bushes and rushes, and the only implement used in the cultivation of the crop was a sort of shovel made from the shoulder blade of the buffalo. For very many years, how long is not known, but probably nearly a century, their chief settlement was in the immediate vicinity of Pierre, but in 1792, being driven away by the Sioux, they settled in the northern part of the state near the mouth of Grand River, where part of the tribe was already established.

When white men first had knowledge of the Dakota country, the Omaha Indians occupied the Big Sioux valley and the Missouri valley as far as the mouth of the James River, while at that time, or very soon thereafter, a settlement of Sisseton Sioux was made at Big Stone Lake, and the Kiowas occupied the Black Hills. All of these tribes, unlike the Rees, were nomadic; that is, they lived in tents and moved about from place to place as suited their convenience.

Sometime in the latter part of the seventeenth century the Sioux Indians who were natives of the timbered coun try about the lakes in northern Minnesota, were forced away from their homes by the Chippewas, and some of their bands came out to the prairie. For many years they remained upon the upper Minnesota River and Big Stone and Traverse lakes, and, having secured horses, began to hunt the buffalo far out on the plains of South Dakota. In the course of time they learned that west of the Missouri River the

snowfall was very light, and that the buffalo gathered there in the winter season to feed upon the rich grasses of what are now the famous South Dakota ranges. This fact made the Sioux wish to live there, where they could secure plenty of buffalo meat with little effort both summer and winter. But the country which they wished to occupy was the home and hunting ground of the Rees, who stubbornly fought off the invading Sioux. It was before 1750 that these prairie or Teton Sioux undertook to conquer the buffalo ranges west of the Missouri. A war of more than forty years followed, in which the Sioux were finally successful. They could not dislodge the Rees from their strong forts on the Missouri, but having succeeded in crossing the river, they were able to keep the buffalo so far away that the Ree hunters could not get them, and thus they really starved out their enemies, who, as we have seen, moved to a new home on the Grand River. As military men would say, the Rees were flanked out of their position by the Sioux.

In 1775 the enterprising Oglala branch of the Teton Sioux had penetrated as far as the Black Hills, where they paid their compliments to the Kiowas and before the end of the eighteenth century had driven them away, and settled in their territory.

While the Teton Sioux were thus making a settlement west of the Missouri, their relatives the Yanktons, who like themselves had been crowded out of the Minnesota timber, were trying to find a home in the lower country between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. They settled among the Osages, but were driven away. Then they conquered a small territory in the Otto country in western Iowa, but finally were driven away from there with the loss of all their horses and other property. Before the Teton Sioux went to the Missouri they had driven the Omahas from the Big Sioux and James rivers to a new home south of the Missouri, and the Teton Sioux claimed the Big Sioux and James valleys as conquered territory. Now, however, while the Tetons' hands were full with their forty years' war with the Rees, the Omahas were threatening to come back into their old South Dakota homes. Therefore when the Yanktons, whipped and robbed by the Ottos, came up the Missouri looking for a place to rest, they were warmly welcomed by the Tetons, who gladly gave them a large territory to occupy on the James River, and fitted them out with arms and horses to enable them to defend their new home from the threatened invasion of the Omahas.

So it came about that before the end of the eighteenth century all of South Dakota, except a very small territory, not more than four or five townships in extent, near the mouth of Grand River, which was occupied by the Rees, had passed into the possession and control of the powerful Sioux tribes.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV

WHITE EXPLORERS

Charles Pierre Le Sueur was one of the most enterprising and energetic of the merchant explorers who came out from Canada and roamed all over the western country in search of trade in furs, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Le Sueur was a fur trader and a politician as well. He was a native of Montreal, and was a cousin of the famous D'Iberville and Bienville who were conspicuous in founding the French settlements in Louisiana and Alabama. He visited the upper Mississippi country as early as the year 1683, and from that time until 1700 spent most of his time upon that stream and westward.

It is claimed that when Le Sueur learned that La Salle had explored the Mississippi River to its mouth, he promptly saw the opportunity to enrich himself by collecting furs in the West and sending them to France and England by way of the Mississippi, thus escaping the payment of the heavy tax placed on the fur traffic by the Canadian government. Sending his cousin, D'Iberville, to the mouth of the Mississippi with a ship, Le Sueur came west of the Mississippi, collected a large amount of furs among the Omaha Indians on the Big Sioux River, and sent them on a flatboat down the Big Sioux and Missouri to the Mississippi, where D'Iberville took them aboard his ship and carried them to Europe, selling them at great profit. Le Sueur himself returned to the Mississippi, where he gathered a small quantity of furs, and taking them back to Canada, dutifully paid the tax upon them, as a good citizen should do. While there are reasons for believing that this story is true, it can not be verified from the records. If true, Le Sueur was the first white man to visit South Dakota.

In any event, Le Sueur in 1699 came back from France, to the West, by way of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and built a fort on the Blue Earth River, a few miles from the site of Mankato, Minnesota, where for a year or two he mined for copper and at the same time carried on a trade with the neighboring Indians. He traded with the Omahas, who still resided on the Big Sioux River, and very probably visited them. He returned to France in 1701 and soon afterward furnished the information from which the geographer De l'Isle made a map of the central portion of North America, including the eastern portion of South Dakota. It is possible that Le Sueur obtained his knowledge of South Dakota from the Indians, but it is most likely that he gained it from personal observation of the ground. The map shows Big Stone Lake and Lake Traverse, the Big Sioux, James, and Missouri rivers in their proper relation and very well drawn. It locates the Omahas (Maha on the map, p. 24) on the Big Sioux, a village of Iowa Indians (Aiaouez) on the James, and the Yanktons on the Missouri in western Iowa, where they were then residing in the Otto country. There is a road shown on the map, extending westward from the mouth of the Wisconsin River, by way of Spirit Lake, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, and marked "track of the voyagers." From all of these things it is believed

De l'Isle's Map, made from Information supplied by Le Sueur

that Le Sueur was the first white man to enter the South Dakota country, but if he did not come here himself, it is quite certain that other white men in his employ did do so, at or before the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The first white man that we know certainly to have visited South Dakota was a young man named Verendrye, in the year 1743. Verendrye was employed, as had been his father before him, by the Canadian government, to explore the American continent westward to the Pacific Ocean. In 1738 the father and son had come as far west as the Missouri, at the Mandan villages in what is now North Dakota, but becoming discouraged had returned to Canada. The father died, and in 1742 the son set out on a new enterprise, reaching the Missouri and following it westward until stopped by the barrier of the Rocky Mountains, at or very near the site of Helena, Montana. There he turned back and, traveling in a southeasterly direction, reached the Missouri River somewhere in central South Dakota, where he spent some weeks with a band of Indians which he calls the band of the Little Cherry. He came to these Indians on the 15th of March, 1743, and remained with them until the 2d of April. Before leaving them he claimed the land for the king of France and upon a hill near the camp planted a lead plate engraved with the arms of France, and marked the spot with a heap of stones. He then set out for the Mandan villages, which he reached on the 18th. To unearth that plate would be a rich find for some enterprising young South Dakotan. Taking into account the directions traveled and the time spent in making the trip, it is most likely that this plate rests within fifty miles of the state capital.

In 1745 De Lusigan, a courier in the employ of the Canadian government, visited Big Stone Lake and other points in western Minnesota to call in the Canadian coureurs de bois, or unlicensed traders who were living with the Indians. This fact is evidence that several white men were probably at this time in the Dakota country, but they left no record of their doings or of the localities they visited.

It is rather strange that no record has been kept of the time when the French traders at St. Louis began to trade up the Missouri among the Dakota tribes. We only know that as early as 1796 a post known as Loisel's house, a substantial fortified trading post, was built on Cedar Island in the Missouri River a few miles below the site of Pierre, and that the next year Trudeau's post, generally known as the Pawnee House, was built on the east side of the Missouri River, opposite the site of Fort Randall. Pierre Dorion, afterward guide to Lewis and Clark, traded with the Yanktons and married a Yankton woman before 1785, and Pierre Garreau lived continuously with the Rees after 1790. From these facts it may be fairly assumed that French trade along the Missouri was quite general from about 1785.

In 1801 the trader Charles Le Raye was captured in Missouri by a war party of Brulé Sioux. They took him to the Sioux River, near Elkpoint; then up the Missouri, visiting Spirit Mound, the Teton River, and several Ree towns on the way; then across to the Minnesota River; then in 1804 back to the Vermilion, where the Brulés held a council upon the question whether to resist the progress of Lewis and Clark, of whom we shall read in a later chapter. That fall Le Raye escaped and returned to the white settlements.

Chapter 5

CHAPTER V

SOME LAND CLAIMS

On the strength of the discoveries of Columbus, and especially of Coronado, who came from Mexico up through New Mexico and into Kansas in 1540-1541, Spain claimed all of the interior of the American continent, including the South Dakota country. She did nothing, however, in the way of exploration or occupancy, to make the claim good, though for more than a hundred years her right was undisputed, until the French from Canada began to trade with the Sioux Indians and claimed for France all of the territory which they entered.

On September 18, 1712, the king of France granted the monopoly of trade in all of the territory lying in the Mississippi valley to Anthony Crozat, a banker of Paris, for the term of sixteen years. The action of the French led the Spaniards to take measures to assert their claims, and they sent men from Santa Fé to drive the French from the lower Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The Spanish plan was to excite the Osage Indians to make war on the Missouri Indians, who were friendly to the French, but by a mistake the Spaniards went directly to the Missouri camp, where the entire party, with one exception, were killed. This led the French to build a fort near the mouth of the Missouri.

In 1732 the king of France reasserted his sovereignty over the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, and governed the section through a governor general who lived at New Orleans. There is no record or probability that either France or Spain took any actual possession of the South Dakota country until young Verendrye claimed it for France in March, 1743.

For nearly twenty years after Verendrye claimed the land France's title seems to have been undisputed, but in 1762 she ceded all of Louisiana, which included South Dakota, to Spain, in return for certain political favors. Spain took possession and governed the land west of the Mississippi for nearly forty years thereafter; then in 1800 she secretly deeded it back to France.

When the American people learned of this secret cession of the Louisiana country to France, the western pioneers in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee were greatly concerned and aroused. The great Napoleon had just made himself the head of the French government; his fame as a soldier and conqueror had spread over the world, and the American frontiersman did not like to have him for a near neighbor.

Thomas Jefferson was then President of the United States. The importance of the control of the Mississippi River was clear to his far-seeing eye. He determined that we must, at least, have a joint right to its free passage and must have a site for a commercial city at its mouth, and he undertook, by sending special representatives to France, to secure these rights. At the same time he prevailed upon Congress to permit him to undertake the exploration of the far West with a view to finding a means of crossing the continent to the Pacific Ocean, and while his ambassadors were at Paris, bargaining for free rights on the Mississippi, Jefferson was pushing his plan to send an exploring party across the American continent. He had his party organized and his plans well matured when, to his surprise, and the surprise of all America, the news came from Paris that the American ministers had bought not only the desired free rights on the Mississippi, but all of the great Louisiana territory as well. Thus it came about that, as a part of Louisiana, South Dakota came into the possession of the United States, having been first claimed by Spain, then by France, again by Spain, again passing to France, and finally falling to the American commonwealth.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

LEWIS AND CLARK

Jefferson selected to head his party of explorers his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, a cousin of George Washington. Scientific knowledge was not very far advanced in America at this time, but early in the spring of 1803, a few days before the bargain with Napoleon had been made and months before it had been thought of in America, Lewis hurried from Washington to Philadelphia to take a brief course in the natural sciences and mathematics, hoping to gain enough to enable him to make scientific observations of the country through which he was to pass, and to determine the latitude and longitude of various places.

While Lewis was in Philadelphia, it occurred to him that it would be wise to organize the expedition in two parts, and keep two records, so that in case one record was lost there would be hope of preserving the other. He told Jefferson about it, and the President thought the plan a wise one; so Captain William Clark—a brother of General George Rogers Clark, the man who in the Revolutionary War had saved Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the United States—was selected to accompany Captain Lewis, and to enjoy with him equal rank in the command of the enterprise.

All of the remainder of that year was spent in preparation. In the summer the two captains set out for St. Louis, and not until they

reached the Ohio River did they learn of the purchase of Louisiana by the American government. They secured the services of forty-one persons, all told—soldiers, guides, boatmen, and hunters—and encamped for the winter on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite the mouth of the Missouri.

The 9th of May, 1804, was set for the formal transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France and from France to the United States, and Jefferson desired Lewis and Clark to remain at St. Louis for that ceremony, which they did. Therefore, it was not until three o'clock in the afternoon of Monday, May 14, that the little band set off up the Missouri. They had several boats, which they propelled with oars or sails, or towed with ropes, according to the condition of the river and the direction of the wind. They proceeded very slowly, examining the river and the country, and visiting the Indians, but without any event affecting the history of South Dakota until they arrived at the mouth of the Big Sioux River at eight o'clock in the morning of August 21, 1804. That night they camped on the Nebraska shore.

Sergeant Charles Floyd having died the evening of August 20, when at the site of Sioux City, the men were allowed to select a successor to him, and the choice, which was made by ballot, fell to Patrick Gass. This occurred on the 22d when the party was encamped at Elkpoint, and it may reasonably be assumed to be the first popular election in South Dakota. The next morning Captain Lewis killed a very large buffalo upon the bottom near Burbank, from which they salted two barrels of meat.

On the 24th they arrived at the mouth of the Vermilion River, and the captains took two men and went up nine miles to examine Spirit Mound, about which they had heard strange stories from the Indians, who believed that it was inhabited by a race of dwarfs, little people not larger than gophers, who instantly put to death any one who came near their home. It is needless to say that the explorers found nothing mysterious or alarming about the very ordinary mound upon the prairie. They did, however, find much that was pleasing to them. They say in their journal, "We saw none of these wicked little spirits, nor any place for them, except some small holes scattered over the top. We were happy enough to escape

their vengeance, though we remained some time on the mound to enjoy the delightful prospect of the plain, which spreads itself out until the eye rests upon the north-west hills at a great distance, and those of the north-east still farther off, enlivened by large herds of buffalo feeding at a distance. The soil of these plains is exceedingly fine."