A Brief History of South Dakota/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
PERMANENT SETTLEMENT
In April, 1858, the Yankton Sioux Indians, who claimed all the land between the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers, as far north as Pierre and Lake Kampeska, made a treaty with the whites, by which they gave up all their lands except four hundred thousand acres in what is now Charles Mix County. This treaty, made by the head men of the Yanktons, was not very popular with the rank and file of the tribe. Struck by the Ree, the boy who was born when Lewis and Clark were at Yankton in 1804, and whom Captain Lewis clothed in the American flag, stood firmly for the treaty, but Smutty Bear, an older man, was strongly opposed to it, and the Yanktons were divided into two parties who were almost at the point of civil war over its ratification.
The time came on the 10th of July, 1859, when the government expected the Yanktons to give up their lands and remove to the reservation. The entire tribe was assembled at Yankton and were in most earnest deliberation over the treaty. Struck by the Ree, with his party, favored going at once to the new home, but old Smutty Bear harangued his people about the graves of their kindred and the hunting grounds of their fathers, and his views made a deep impression on the tribe. Finally when Old Strike, as the whites called Struck by the Ree, was breaking camp to start for the reservation, Smutty Bear sent his young men on horseback in a wild chase about the friendly camp, intended to intimidate the men
Struck by the Ree
and frighten the women and children and prevent them from moving.
At that instant a steamboat, coming up river, bellowed at the landing, and with a childlike simplicity which Indians always showed when anything aroused their curiosity, the entire tribe forgot about their troubles and raced off to the landing. It was the steamboat Wayfarer bringing to them their new agent, Mr. Redfield, and a cargo of provisions for their supply. Agent Redfield made a speech in which he told them that he was going to proceed up the river until he had found a proper site for the location of their new agency, on the tract of land they had reserved for their own use, and that as soon as he arrived there he would make for them a grand feast, to which they were all invited. The steamer then set off upstream and the Yankton nation, like a pack of delighted children, crowded and hustled one another along the bank, eager to see who would first reach the place on the reservation where the feast was to be spread. Whites and Indians alike deemed this a sufficient ratification of the treaty, and there never was any more trouble about it.
After the treaty had been signed in 1858, supposing that it would be ratified very soon, many settlers gathered along the banks of the Missouri, on the Nebraska side of the stream, waiting to come over and occupy the rich Dakota lands as soon as they could legally do so. Month after month they waited until this tenth day of July, 1859, when the departure of the Indians for the reservation was quickly reported among them, and that day hundreds of them came over, beginning the settlements at Yankton, Bon Homme, Meckling, and Vermilion.
Some of these settlers had reached the Dakota land by steamboats upon the Missouri River, but generally they had come with ox teams and covered wagons which they called "prairie schooners." As there was plenty of timber along the rivers, they built their first homes of hewn logs. Some of the houses whose foundations were laid on that tenth day of July, 1859, are still standing. Some breaking was done, but it was too late in the season to grow any crops that year. The town sites at Bon Homme, Yankton, and Vermilion were entered upon by adventurous men with large dreams of town building, but in the fertile bottom lands between the James and Vermilion rivers many farmers settled, who had no more ambitious plans than to build for themselves and their families permanent farm homes, and most of them with their children still occupy the homesteads they took upon that day, or sleep peacefully in the little churchyards near by.
In the Valley of the James
So it was that a settlement in opposition to that upon the Sioux River was planted in the Missouri valley, so different in every way that there were scarcely any lines of likeness between them. The one was moved by dreams of power and wealth, without labor, the other sought only homes where a livelihood might be secured by honest toil. It is hardly necessary to say that while the former sadly failed, the latter, overcoming every obstacle, became the permanent and prosperous motherland of the future state.