Sioux Falls South Dakota History & Facts

Sioux Falls is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Dakota and the 131st-most populous city in the United States. It is the county seat of Minnehaha County and also extends into Lincoln County to the south, proximate with the Iowa state line. As of 2020, Sioux Falls had a population of 192,517, which was estimated in 2022 to have increased to 202,600. The Sioux Falls metro area accounts for more than 30% of the state's population. Chartered in 1856 on the banks of the Big Sioux River, the city is situated in the rolling hills at the junction of interstates 29 and 90.

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, and Cheyenne people inhabited and settled the region previous to Europeans and European descendants. Numerous burial mounds still exist on the high bluffs near the river and are spread throughout the general vicinity. Indigenous people maintained an agricultural society with fortified villages, and the later arrivals rebuilt on many of the same sites that were previously settled. Lakota populate urban and reservation communities in the contemporary state and many Lakota, Dakota, and numerous other Indigenous Americans reside in Sioux Falls today.

French voyagers/explorers visited the area in the early 18th century. 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".

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, considered 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 native tribes attempting to defend their land from the settlers. Seventeen men then spent "the first winter" in Sioux Falls. The following year the population grew to near 40.

Sioux Falls is located at 43°32'11" North, 96°43'54" West (43.536285, −96.731780). According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 73.47 square miles (190.29 km2), of which 72.96 square miles (188.97 km2) is land and 0.51 square miles (1.32 km2) is water. The city is in extreme eastern South Dakota, about 15 miles (24 km) west of the Minnesota border. Sioux Falls has been assigned the ZIP Codes 57101, 57103–57110, 57117–57118, 57188–57189, and 57192–57198, and the FIPS place code 59020.

Famous Peoples From Sioux Falls South Dakota

Robert Maynard Pirsig

(September 6, 1928 – April 24, 2017) was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991) and he co-authored the upcoming On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings (2022) along with his wife (now widow) and editor, Wendy Pirsig.

Pirsig was born on September 6, 1928, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Harriet Marie Sjobeck and Maynard Pirsig. He was of German and Swedish descent. His father was a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, taught in that school from 1934, served as its dean from 1948 to 1955, and retired from teaching there in 1970. He subsequently taught at the William Mitchell College of Law until his retirement in 1993.

A precocious child with an alleged IQ of 170 at the age of nine, Pirsig skipped several grades at the Blake School in Minneapolis. In May 1943, Pirsig was awarded a high school diploma at the age of 14 by the University High School (later renamed Marshall-University High School), where he had edited the school yearbook, the Bisbilla. Pirsig then studied biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes the central character, thought to represent himself, as being an atypical student, interested in science in itself rather than a professional career path.

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