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Home > South Dakota
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South Dakota
Human beings have existed in what is today South Dakota for at least some thousand years. French as well as other European explorers in the 1700s came across a variety of groups together with the Omaha as well as Arikara (Ree), but the Sioux were dominant by the early 1800s. In 1743, the LaVerendrye brothers buried a shield near the site of current day Pierre, claiming the area for France as part of greater Louisiana.
The United States bought the Louisiana region from Napoleon In 1803, and President Thomas Jefferson prepared a group universally referred to as the "Lewis and Clark Expedition" to survey the newly-acquired expanse. An American fur trading post was founded at present-day Fort Pierre In 1817, beginning continuous American occupation of the region. In 1855, the U.S. Army bought Fort Pierre but deserted it the following year in support of Fort Randall to the south. Settlement by Europeans and Americans was by this time growing rapidly, and then the Yankton Sioux signed the 1858 Treaty, relinquishing the majority of present-day eastern South Dakota towards the United States.
Land speculators established two of eastern South Dakota's biggest present-day cities: Yankton in 1859 and Sioux Falls in 1856. In 1861, Dakota Territory was formed by the United States government this originally included North Dakota, Wyoming, and parts of Montana and South Dakota. Settlers from Russia, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, in addition to elsewhere in Europe and as of the eastern U.S. states amplified from a trickle to a flood, particularly following the completion of an eastern railway connection to the regional capital of Yankton in 1872, and the unearthing of gold within the Black Hills in 1874 throughout a military expedition headed by George A. Custer. This expedition happened despite the truth that the western half of existing South Dakota had been approved to the Sioux by means of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 as a piece of the Great Sioux Reservation. The Sioux refused to award land or mining rights in the Black Hills, and war broke out once the U.S. failed to stop white settlers and miners from entering the area. The Sioux were eventually settled and defeated on reservations inside North Dakota and South Dakota.
A growing population caused Dakota region to be separated in half and a bill for statehood for South Dakota and North Dakota as well as Washington and Montana named the Enabling Act of 1889 was ratified on February 22, 1889 in the Grover Cleveland Administration. It was left to his successor, Benjamin Harrison, to sign declarations officially admitting South and North Dakota to the Union on 2nd November, 1889. James G. Blaine Secretary of State Harrison was directed to mix up the papers and to make it unclear for him what he was signing first and the real order went unrecorded.
On December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre happened within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Commonly mentioned as the last major armed conflict among the United States as well as the Sioux Nation, the massacre produced the deaths of a projected 300 Sioux, several of them children and women. 25 U.S. soldiers were as well killed in the conflict.
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