page_title: Sioux Falls, South Dakota
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sioux Falls, South Dakota / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1908 Panorama of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA. Looking west.
context_page_description: Sioux Falls is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Dakota and the 140th-most populous city in the United States. It is the county seat of Minnehaha County and also extends into Lincoln County to the south, proximate with the Iowa state line.
  As of 2019, Sioux Falls had an estimated population of 183,793. The metropolitan population of 265,653 accounts for 29% of South Dakota's population. Chartered in 1856 on the banks of the Big Sioux River, the city is situated in the rolling hills at the junction of Interstate 90 and Interstate 29.
  According to Best Life magazine, Sioux Falls is the healthiest city in the United States and is often considered one of the healthiest cities in the US by many other organizations.
context_section_description: The history of Sioux Falls revolves around the cascades of the Big Sioux River. The falls were created about 14,000 years ago during the last ice age. The lure of the falls has been a powerful influence. Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Otoe, Missouri, Omaha (and Ponca at the time), Quapaw, Kansa, Osage, Arikira, Dakota, and Cheyenne people inhabited and settled the region previous to Europeans and European descendants. Numerous burial mounds still exist on the high bluffs near the river and are spread throughout the general vicinity. Indigenous people maintained an agricultural society with fortified villages, and the later arrivals rebuilt on many of the same sites that were previously settled. Lakota populate urban and reservation communities in the contemporary state and many Lakota, Dakota, and numerous other Indigenous Americans reside in Sioux Falls today.
  French voyagers/explorers visited the area in the early 18th century. The first documented visit by an American (of European descent) was by Philander Prescott, who camped overnight at the falls in December 1832. Captain James Allen led a military expedition out of Fort Des Moines in 1844. Jacob Ferris described the Falls in his 1856 book "The States and Territories of the Great West".
  Two separate groups, the Dakota Land Company of St. Paul and the Western Town Company of Dubuque, Iowa organized in 1856 to claim the land around the falls, considered a promising townsite for its beauty and water power. Each laid out 320-acre (1.3 km²) claims, but worked together for mutual protection. They built a temporary barricade of turf which they dubbed "Fort Sod", in response to native tribes attempting to defend their land from the settlers. Seventeen men then spent "the first winter" in Sioux Falls. The following year the population grew to near 40.
  Although conflicts in Minnehaha County between Native Americans and white settlers were few, the Dakota War of 1862 engulfed nearby southwestern Minnesota. The town was evacuated in August of that year when two local settlers were killed as a result of the conflict. The settlers and soldiers stationed here traveled to Yankton in late August 1862. The abandoned townsite was pillaged and burned.
  Fort Dakota, a military reservation established in present-day downtown, was established in May 1865. Many former settlers gradually returned and a new wave of settlers arrived in the following years. The population grew to 593 by 1873, and a building boom was underway in that year. The Village of Sioux Falls, consisting of 1,200 acres (4.9 km²), was incorporated in 1876 and was granted a city charter by the Dakota Territorial legislature on March 3, 1883.
  The arrival of the railroads ushered in the great Dakota Boom decade of the 1880s. The population of Sioux Falls mushroomed from 2,164 in 1880 to 10,167 at the close of the decade. The growth transformed the city. A severe plague of grasshoppers and a national depression halted the boom by the early 1890s. The city grew by only 89 people from 1890 to 1900.
  But prosperity eventually returned with the opening of the John Morrell meat packing plant in 1909, the establishment of an airbase and a military radio and communications training school in 1942, and the completion of the interstate highways in the early 1960s. Much of the growth in the first part of the 20th century was fueled by agriculturally based industry, such as the Morrell plant and the nearby stockyards (one of the largest in the nation).
  In 1955 the city decided to consolidate the neighboring incorporated city of South Sioux Falls. At the time South Sioux Falls had a population of nearly 1,600 inhabitants, according to the 1950 census. It was third largest city in the county after Sioux Falls and Dell Rapids. By October 18, 1955 South Sioux Falls residents voted 704 in favor and 227 against to consolidate with Sioux Falls. On the same issue, Sioux Falls residents voted on November 15 by the vote 2,714 in favor and 450 against.
  In 1981, to take advantage of recently relaxed state usury laws, Citibank relocated its primary credit card cen
caption: Downtown Sioux Falls in 1908, looking west.
exif: {}