NPS Photo
Yankton Sioux Treaty Monument
First Contact With Lewis & Clark
When Meriwether Lewis learned that a male child had been born near the expedition's encampment in what is today southeastern South Dakota, he sent for the child and wrapped the new born baby boy in an American flag during the council at Calumet Bluff in late August 1804. Lewis declared the baby an American. This boy grew up to become a headman (chief) of the Ihanktonwan Nakota (Yankton Sioux), known as Struck By-the-Ree.
Pressure & Land Cession
By the late 1850s pressure to open up what is now southeastern South Dakota to white settlement had become very strong. Struck-by-the-Ree and several other headmen journeyed to Washington, D.C., in late 1857 to negotiate a treaty with the federal government. For more then three and a half months, they worked out the terms of a treaty of land cession. Struck-by-the-Ree's name appears first on the Treaty of Washington, signed April 19, 1858.
For about eleven and a half million acres, a payment of approximately $1.6 million in annuities was to paid over the next 50 years. Specific provisions of the treaty called for educating the tribe to develop skills in agriculture, industrial arts and homemaking. This treaty provided for the removal of the tribe to a 475,000-acre reservation on the north side of the Missouri River in what is now Charles Mix County. (Charles E. Mix was the commissioner who signed for the federal government.) The US Senate ratified the treaty on February 16, 1859 and President Buchanan authorized it ten days later. On July 10, 1859, the Yankton Sioux vacated the ceded lands and moved onto the newly-created reservation.
Treaty Monument
Text on the monument states: To commemorate the treaty between the United States of America and the Yankton Tribe of Sioux or Dakota Indians. Concluded at Washington, D.C. April 18, 1856; Ratified by the Senate February 16, 1859.
In Memory of the Yankton Chiefs who made the Treaty of 1858.
Struck By The Ree, Black Bear, Medicine Crow, White Swan, Pretty Boy, Feather In The Ear, Crazy Bull, Frank Deloria
The Monument can be found on a hill approximately 1/4 mile north of Greenwood, South Dakota (where the original Yankton Sioux Agency headquarters was located) off Bon Homme County Road 2.
