Before the Rails: The Lakota and Dakota Homeland
Near Aberdeen, South Dakota
The Jim River valley that Aberdeen occupies was not empty when the Milwaukee Road's surveyors arrived in eighteen eighty-one. It had been occupied for generations by peoples of the Sioux Nation, a broad confederation whose branches the French called the Dakota, the Nakota, and the Lakota, terms describing related dialects of the same language family.
The Eastern Dakota bands, particularly the Wahpeton and the Sisseton, had summered in the James River drainage for generations. The river, called Itazipokakse Wakpa, or Bow Cutting River, in the Sioux language, provided a reliable water source on the otherwise dry central plains. The surrounding grasslands supported vast bison herds and the entire web of economies built around them.
The Treaty of Fort Laramie in eighteen sixty-eight guaranteed the Sioux a great reservation in the region, a promise the United States government violated almost immediately when gold was discovered in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy-four. The resulting Great Sioux War and the federal seizure of the Black Hills remain legally contested to this day. The United States Supreme Court ruled in nineteen eighty that the government had taken the Black Hills illegally and awarded the Lakota more than one hundred million dollars in compensation. The Lakota nations have refused the money, insisting on land return instead. The award now sits, with accrued interest, at over one billion dollars unclaimed.
When Aberdeen's founders named streets and county seats in the eighteen eighties, they were settling land that the Dakota had not voluntarily ceded. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate nations remain active governing bodies in South Dakota today, and their reservations lie within a few hours of Aberdeen in every direction. The prairie that seemed empty to the railroad promoters was simply emptied, by force, shortly before they arrived.
