People have been living in South Dakota for at least 12,000 years. The earliest inhabitants were ancestors of the American Indians, nomads who hunted the Great Plains for giant bison and woolly mammoths. These wandering tribes were followed by a hunting and gathering people who buried their dead in long, low mounds.

Around 1200 A.D. the Mandans and Arikara brought their agricultural ways to the area. They built earth lodge villages and grew crops along the Missouri River until the Sioux drove them out--into what is now North Dakota--in the middle 1700s and early 1800s.

The first white men to enter South Dakota were the Verendryes, a pair of Frenchmen who claimed the region for their king in 1743. Before long, French and British traders were bartering with the Indians for hides and furs, and Lewis and Clark were piloting their canoes up the Missouri River to map the territory for President Thomas Jefferson.

Communities began to spring up in the late 1850s, but there were still only 2,500 white settlers in the Dakota Territory when it was created in 1861. Then the Homestead Act, railroad promotions and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills attracted hordes of miners and pioneers, so that by the time South Dakota entered the Union in 1889, it had a population well over 300,000.

Source: State of South Dakota.