Eagle Butte: Heart of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation

Eagle Butte is the tribal headquarters of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the county seat of Dewey County, sitting at the center of one of the largest Indian reservations in the United States. The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation was created in eighteen eighty-nine when Congress broke up the Great Sioux Reservation and separated four of the seven Lakota bands onto smaller tracts. The reservation covers nearly all of Dewey and Ziebach counties, nearly three million acres, making it the fourth-largest tribally-owned land area in the country.

Eagle Butte itself was incorporated in nineteen eleven. Today about eighty-seven percent of its roughly twelve hundred residents are American Indian. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe governs a broad range of services here, from schools to healthcare to economic development, for a membership of more than fifteen thousand enrolled members across a landscape of rolling short-grass prairie and the Missouri River breaks.