Dupree: Heart of the Cheyenne River Reservation

Dupree is the county seat of Ziebach County, South Dakota, and virtually the entire county lies within the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. The town takes its name from Fred Dupris, a pioneer settler, and dates to nineteen ten when the Milwaukee Railroad built through the territory, following the same pattern that seeded dozens of small Dakota towns: rails arrive, a post office follows, a county gets organized around it. Ziebach County itself was formalized in nineteen eleven.

The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation was created in eighteen eighty-nine when the United States broke up the Great Sioux Reservation following the wars of the eighteen seventies. Four bands of the Lakota Nation call this land home: the Minneconjou, the Sans Arc, the Blackfeet Lakota, and the Two Kettle. Dupree is the only incorporated community located entirely within Ziebach County, making it the sole urban center, however small, for a reservation that stretches across thousands of square miles of high plains grassland.