The Big Sioux River Valley Frontier, 1851-1889
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2022
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Augustana University
Abstract
The Big Sioux River flows through eastern South Dakota, entering the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa. Its watershed includes parts of southwestern Minnesota and northwestern
Iowa. The first significant non-Indian presence in the Big Sioux River valley were European and American fur traders, but the region took decades to attract a significant white population. By the 1850s Europeans and Americans were beginning to settle in northwest Iowa and tricking into South Dakota. Starting in 1851 the first of a series of treaties and cessions opened the Dakotas for white emigration. Four years later Sioux City was founded at the junction of the Big Sioux and the Missouri River. Congress established the Dakota Territory in 1861. The end of the Civil War and improved transportation brought more immigrants, as did liberal land policies such as the Homestead Act. Railroads tied the territory to eastern cities and encouraged even more immigration in the 1870s and 1880s. Most people settled in eastern Dakota, with the Big Sioux valley one of its population centers. The Great Dakota Boom (1878-1887) added hundreds of thousands of people to the territory, pushing its population to 600,000 in 1890. Towns blossomed and the Dakota countryside filled in, full of the Americans and the foreign-born chasing their dreams of farm ownership.
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Comments
This book chapter is published as Bremer, J., “The Big Sioux River Valley Frontier, 1851-1889,” in Heartland River: Essays on the Big Sioux River Valley, edited by Jon K. Lauck. Sioux Falls: The Center for Western Studies, Augustana University, 2022.Chapter 6;171-184. https://www.augie.edu/heartland-river-cultural-and-environmental-history-big-sioux-river-valley . Posted with permission.