The Lakota and the Missouri

The Lakota, the westernmost branch of the Great Sioux Nation, arrived on the Missouri in the mid-seventeen hundreds after a long migration westward from the Great Lakes region, pushed by conflict with the Ojibwe and drawn by the horses and bison that had transformed plains life. By the early eighteen hundreds they had become the dominant power across the northern plains, controlling the Missouri River corridor through diplomacy and, when necessary, force.

The river was the center of everything. Its valley provided timber and shelter in a treeless landscape, its bottomlands grew the grasses that fed bison and horses, and its channel connected the Lakota to a continent-wide trade network. Fort Pierre, when the American Fur Company built it in eighteen thirty-two, succeeded precisely because it plugged into that existing Lakota trading economy. The company offered guns, metal tools, and manufactured cloth; the Lakota offered the buffalo robes that paid for all of it.

That relationship began unraveling almost immediately. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one recognized Lakota territory on the northern plains, including the Black Hills. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight recognized the Great Sioux Reservation covering all land west of the Missouri, including the Black Hills. By eighteen seventy-six, gold had been discovered in the Black Hills and the United States government simply took them. The treaties were declared void. The reservation was broken into smaller parcels. The bison were gone by eighteen eighty-three.

Today nine federally recognized Sioux tribes hold land in South Dakota. The Missouri River corridor remains a place of significance to Lakota and Dakota people, a landscape layered with history that runs deeper than any of the monuments along its banks.