Fort Randall Area

The Fort Randall area was home to major movements and encounters among Native peoples, traders, explorers, and the U.S. military. The Omaha and Ponca were once a single people related to the Osage, Kansa, and Quapaw, and after migrating up the Missouri River to the Big Sioux River valley they lived in a large village southeast of modern Sioux Falls, sometimes with their Ioway allies, where they raised corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers and hunted bison and other game. Before 1700, Sioux attacks drove the Omaha and their allies south and west to the Missouri River; the Ponca remained near the mouth of the Niobrara, the Omaha moved downstream to Bow Creek in present Nebraska, and the Ioway went farther downstream to the Ionia site, where Lewis and Clark found the Ponca and Omaha in 1804. In 1794 Jean Baptiste Trudeau traveled up the Missouri to trade with the Arikaree, was stopped near the mouth of Crow Creek by Sioux traders, then reached abandoned Arikaree villages near the mouth of the Cheyenne River after an epidemic had killed 75 percent of their people. Turning back to winter on the east side of the river below the present dam, he built a log house near a spring, but in December the Omaha chief Blackbird and his band extorted food and trade goods through the winter until leaving in March 1795, after which Chief Rabbit and his Poncas traded meat that saved Trudeau's party. Trudeau resumed his journey on March 25, 1795, but found another French trader had already secured the Arikaree trade goods; his winter post still stood when Lewis and Clark passed on September 8, 1804, calling it Pawnee House because of an Omaha legend that Pawnee warrior spirits had protected the Frenchmen from Blackbird. Fort Randall itself was first located by General Harney in early spring 1856 near Handys Point, where Fort Randall Dam now stands, and was built of cottonwood logs and salvaged material from Fort Pierre before being moved in the 1870s about one-half mile back from the river. Created mainly as a supply base for treaty obligations Harney had made with the Sioux at Fort Pierre, the post had 24 log structures by 1859 housing six companies, about 500 men, and because it stood near Sioux City among peaceful Yankton Sioux it lacked the usual picket enclosure. After the Yankton Reservation was established across the river in 1859, with its agency at Greenwood, the Yanktons, cut off from the bison hunt, depended on agriculture and government subsidies collected regularly at Fort Randall. From 1865 to 1874 the fort's troops were busy protecting settlements, immigrants, surveyors, and railroads pushing west, dealing with unrest among the Yanktons when annuities were late, and responding to harassment from hostile Teton bands. After gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, illegal entry onto Indian treaty lands broke the region's uneasy peace, but most fighting occurred far to the northwest, while Fort Randall continued as a supply depot and stabilizing presence for both white and Indian residents. By 1880 hostilities in Dakota Territory had nearly ended, and although Fort Randall had become one of the best constructed and most desirable posts on the upper Missouri, its usefulness declined; by 1884 only a skeleton force remained, and in 1892 it was abandoned. Many buildings were sold to Nebraska farmers, and by 1899 only the commandant's house and the chapel remained; after a windstorm tore off the chapel roof and its pews, organ, and bell were removed, the chapel fell into ruin. For more than three decades Fort Randall had been a stabilizing influence and social center for the region.

Pickstown, South Dakota · United States