Sioux Falls is the largest city in South Dakota, with a population now exceeding 150,000. It is located in the southeastern part of the state with the majority of the municipality in Minnehaha County.
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, Nakota and Cheyenne people inhabited the region previous to European descendants. Numerous burial mounds still exist on the high bluffs near the river. These people operated an agricultural society that built fortified villages on many of the same sites that were previously settled. Lakota populate urban and reservation communities in the contemporary state and many Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, and other Indigenous Americans reside in Sioux Falls today.[6]
The first documented European visit was made by French voyagers/explorers, in the early 1700s, who mapped the area and took census counts of the Indigenous cities communities at that time (with the Blood Run population being 10,000 people, not outnumbered in population until the 1800s by Euro-American settlers, thus this area has been a thriving urban area for quite some time).
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".[7]
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, considering 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 hostilities threatened by native tribes. 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.[9]
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 the 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 the city 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 decided to relocate its primary credit card center from New York to Sioux Falls. Many claim that this event was the primary impetus for the increased population and job growth rates that Sioux Falls has experienced over the past quarter century. Others point out that Citibank's relocation was only part of a more general transformation of the city's economy from an industrially-based one to an economy centered on health care, finance and retail trade.[10]
Sioux Falls has grown at a rapid pace since the late 1970s, with the city's population increasing from 81,000 in 1980 to a 2007 estimate of 154,997.
Courtesy of Website.