Pierre: The Capital at the Center of Everything
Near Pierre, South Dakota
Pierre sits almost exactly at the geographic heart of South Dakota, on the east bank of the Missouri River, and that central location explains practically everything about why it exists. The Missouri was the corridor through which French explorers, fur traders, Lewis and Clark, and the U.S.
Army all traveled into the interior of the continent. The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty and platted a town overnight. Pierre was chosen as the state capital when South Dakota became a state in eighteen eighty-nine and fought off repeated challenges from larger cities to keep that status permanently in nineteen oh four.
Today it is one of the smallest state capitals in the country, a city of around fourteen thousand people in a state of about seventy-seven thousand square miles, where the dome of the capitol is visible from the river and the history buried underfoot runs from the ancient Arikara villages to the buried French plate to the fur trade to the Lakota treaties to the Oahe Dam that reshaped the river itself.
