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
