title
Falls of the Big Sioux River from the archives of the Library of Congress.
Fort Sod The Story Behind the Marker MARKER AUTHOR: WAYNE FANEBUST
I
n mid-summer of 1858, a small but determined group of pioneers — 36 in all, including one woman — were fearfully cloistered in a small, crudely and hastilyconstructed fort of sod, which they called, appropriately: “Fort Sod.” It was located near the bank of the Big Sioux River, near present-day 9th Street in Sioux Falls. The Fort Sod incident has been mentioned in just about every book written about the early days of Minnehaha
22 out and about |
HISTORY
County history, and as such, many history buffs and historians are familiar with it. It has been ranked as one of the unique stories about the dangerous Dakota frontier. The people who occupied this simple, but important, historical edifice had been warned about a possible attack by Native Americans who were angry and upset over the increasing presence of white people along the Big Sioux River. Only two years before the building of Fort
Sod, the first town site speculators came to the Falls of the Big Sioux river. They were from the Western Town Company created in October of 1856, in Dubuque, Iowa. They came in the fall of the year and claimed 320 acres of land, including Falls, under a federal town site law passed by Congress in 1844. They called their town site “Sioux Falls.” By the summer of 1857, the Dubuque speculators had company. The Dakota
