Fort Sod to Fort Dakota: The Town That Had to Start Twice
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Two companies arrived at the falls in eighteen fifty-six within weeks of each other, each convinced the site would become a great city. The Western Town Company and the Dakota Land Company had both read the same geography and reached the same conclusion: the falls could power mills, the river could float goods, the prairie could feed a population. They staked competing claims and built what they called Fort Sod, a rough barricade of earth and timber meant less to hold back armies than to signal that someone was already here.
The two companies eventually merged their claims and began laying out lots. Within a year Sioux Falls had a handful of wooden structures, a surveyed street grid, and a population in the dozens. Then, in August of eighteen sixty-two, it had nothing.
The U.S.-Dakota War had begun in Minnesota weeks earlier, ignited by broken treaty promises and delayed annuities that had left Dakota families without food. The violence moved fast. Word reached Sioux Falls that two settlers had been killed nearby. The residents and the small military garrison did not wait. They gathered what they could carry and fled southeast to Yankton. The buildings they left behind were burned, whether by Dakota warriors, by departing settlers, or by opportunists, the record is not precise on every point.
The site sat empty for nearly three years.
In May of eighteen sixty-five, Lieutenant Colonel John Pattee arrived from the Sixth Iowa Cavalry with enough men to establish Fort Dakota on the banks of the Big Sioux, roughly where the city center stands today. The Army stayed four years, long enough for homesteaders to return, for merchants to rebuild, and for the falls to become again what they had always looked like on paper: the center of something.
The Army abandoned Fort Dakota in eighteen sixty-nine. The city did not need it anymore.
