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Official Website
Sioux Falls is the county seat of Minnehaha County and extends into Lincoln County.
History
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. Lakota populate urban and reservation communities in the contemporary state and many Lakota, Dakota, and numerous other Indigenous Americans reside in Sioux Falls today.
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. Each laid out 320-acre 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.
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. The Village of Sioux Falls, consisting of 1,200 acres, was incorporated in 1876 and was granted a city charter by the Dakota Territorial legislature on March 3, 1883.
The arrival of the railroads ushered in the great Dakota Boom decade of the 1880s. A severe plague of grasshoppers and a national depression halted the boom by the early 1890s.
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 agriculturally based industry, such as the Morrell plant and the nearby stockyards.
In 1981, to take advantage of recently relaxed state usury laws, Citibank relocated its primary credit card center from New York City to Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls has grown at a rapid pace since the late 1970s, with the city's population increasing from 81,000 in 1980 to 183,200 in 2018.
Cemeteries
