SDSouth Dakota History

Capital: Pierre · Midwest · Admitted 1889

In February 1913 a group of teenagers scrambling on a bluff above Fort Pierre scuffed loose a sheet of lead. It had been buried there on March 30, 1743 by the brothers François and Louis-Joseph de La Vérendrye, who were claiming the country for Louis XV, and it had sat in the gravel for 170 years while French, Spanish, American and Lakota authority moved back and forth across the ground above it. The Vérendrye plate is a fair emblem of the state's past: paperwork filed by people passing through, over land that already had residents and kept them.

Earth lodges on the Missouri, and the Lakota moving west

The Arikara, who call themselves Sahnish, farmed the Missouri terraces from fortified earth lodge towns, raising corn, beans, squash and sunflowers and running the trade fairs that supplied dried produce to the hunting peoples out on the open grass. East of the river were the Dakota and the Yankton and Yanktonai Nakota. Through the 1700s the Lakota, the westernmost of the seven council fires, crossed the Missouri with horses that had worked north out of Spanish New Mexico, and by the 1770s they were hunting in the Black Hills, which they call Paha Sapa. Smallpox did the rest of the rearranging. The epidemics of 1780 and 1837 gutted the river villages, and surviving Arikara families moved upstream to shelter with the Mandan and Hidatsa in what is now North Dakota.

The Louisiana Purchase and the fur posts

The 1803 Louisiana Purchase handed the Missouri basin to the United States, and Lewis and Clark came up the river the following year. Their tensest days of the entire outbound journey were spent in late September 1804 at the mouth of the Bad River, where Pierre stands today, in a three day standoff with a Brulé Lakota band that could have finished the expedition on the spot. What followed was commerce rather than settlement. Fort Pierre Chouteau, built in 1832, became the largest American Fur Company post on the upper Missouri, and the steamboat Yellow Stone showed that the river could be worked by engine this far north. The Army bought the post in 1855. Dakota Territory, covering both future Dakotas plus slices of Montana and Wyoming, was organized on March 2, 1861, with its capital at Yankton.

Gold on French Creek

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 set aside everything west of the Missouri, the Black Hills included, as the Great Sioux Reservation. Six years later George Custer led an expedition into the hills anyway, and his miners found gold on French Creek. Deadwood filled with prospectors in 1876, the Army stopped pretending to turn them back, and after the Great Sioux War of 1876 and 1877 Congress simply legislated the Black Hills away. The Homestake Mine at Lead, opened in 1876, ran until 2002 and became the deepest mine in North America. In 1980 the Supreme Court held in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the seizure had required just compensation, and set the award near $106 million. The Sioux nations have refused to take it. The money sits in a Treasury account, well past a billion dollars now, because accepting it would ratify the sale.

One territory, two states, 1889

Railroads drove the Great Dakota Boom between 1878 and 1887, and the southern half of the territory, more populous and tired of the long haul to Yankton, wanted a government of its own. The omnibus bill of February 22, 1889 provided for four new states. Benjamin Harrison signed the two Dakota proclamations on November 2, 1889 with the papers shuffled so nobody could say which had come first, and the pair were entered alphabetically, making North Dakota the 39th state and South Dakota the 40th. Pierre beat Huron in a capital election that same year and beat Mitchell again in 1904. Thirteen months after statehood, on December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry killed roughly 250 to 300 Lakota, most of them unarmed and many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Concrete, granite and a repealed interest cap

Gutzon Borglum began blasting the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt out of Black Hills granite in 1927 and stopped in October 1941. Korczak Ziolkowski started the Crazy Horse Memorial seventeen miles away in 1948, and it is still unfinished. The Pick-Sloan Act of 1944 put four enormous dams on the South Dakota reach of the Missouri, among them Oahe, which John F. Kennedy dedicated in 1962. The reservoirs drowned the wooded bottomland that Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek and Standing Rock families lived on, and the relocations are still resented. In 1973 the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days. The most consequential modern law was the quietest one: in 1980 the legislature repealed the state ceiling on interest rates at Governor Bill Janklow's urging, Citibank moved its credit card operation to Sioux Falls the next year, and a cattle and corn state acquired a banking industry. The old Homestake shaft found a second career too, reopening in 2007 as the Sanford Underground Research Facility, where physicists use a mile of rock to shield experiments hunting dark matter.

Admission years show up in the daily puzzle

Statedoku uses statehood dates as recurring constraints, so the 1889 Dakota pair comes around often.

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Questions people ask about South Dakota history

When did South Dakota become a state?

November 2, 1889, as the 40th state. North Dakota was admitted the same day under the same omnibus act, and President Benjamin Harrison had the two proclamations shuffled before signing so that neither could claim priority. The states were then numbered alphabetically.

Why won't the Sioux accept the Black Hills money?

The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the 1877 taking of the Black Hills violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and awarded compensation of roughly $106 million. Accepting payment would legally settle the claim, so the Sioux nations have left the fund untouched and continue to seek return of the land itself.

Was South Dakota part of the Louisiana Purchase?

Yes. The whole state came to the United States in the 1803 purchase from France. Lewis and Clark passed through in 1804, fur companies followed, and Dakota Territory was not organized until March 2, 1861.

What happened at Wounded Knee?

Two things, 83 years apart. On December 29, 1890 the Seventh Cavalry killed some 250 to 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 1973 the American Indian Movement occupied the same site for 71 days in an armed standoff with federal agents.

Why are so many credit cards issued from Sioux Falls?

South Dakota repealed its usury ceiling in 1980. Because a 1978 Supreme Court decision let banks export their home state's interest rate nationwide, Citibank relocated its card operation to Sioux Falls in 1981, and other issuers followed.