Senator Pettigrew: The Man Who Built the City and Then Broke With It
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Richard Franklin Pettigrew arrived in Sioux Falls in eighteen sixty-nine as a twenty-one-year-old surveyor. He never really left, even when he was in Washington. Over the next four decades he was present at nearly every transaction that shaped the city: surveying its streets, lobbying for its railroad connections, financing the Queen Bee Mill, lobbying Congress to place the federal prison here, and when South Dakota achieved statehood in eighteen eighty-nine, becoming the state's first United States Senator.
He was a Republican then, and a booster of the standard Republican stripe. But something changed in the eighteen nineties. The farmers of the plains were getting crushed by railroad freight rates and falling commodity prices, and Pettigrew found himself siding with them against the financial interests his party represented. He bolted the Republican national convention in eighteen ninety-six and aligned himself with the free-silver movement, which argued that inflating the money supply by coining silver at a fixed ratio would ease the debt burden on farmers and workers. His party did not forgive him.
By the turn of the century Pettigrew had gone further. When the United States crushed the Philippine independence movement after the Spanish-American War, Pettigrew rose in the Senate to say so plainly: what America was doing in the Philippines was imperialism, and it contradicted every principle the nation claimed to hold. Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio said he had two goals in nineteen hundred, to re-elect President McKinley and to defeat Pettigrew. A national Republican fundraising campaign poured nearly five hundred thousand dollars into South Dakota. Pettigrew lost.
He spent his later years in Sioux Falls collecting artifacts from around the world, a hobby that had grown into a serious accumulation, and he built a small museum behind his house. When he died in nineteen twenty-six, he left the house and everything in it to the city.
The Pettigrew Home and Museum still stands on Duluth Avenue. It is one of the few places where you can read the history of the frontier's most successful booster and its most principled apostate in the same building.
