Firesteel

The settlement took its name from the creek, and the creek's name is older than any homestead here. On Joseph Nicollet's map of 1843, drawn from his surveys of 1838 and 1839, the stream appears as Chankah, or Fire Steel River, set down in his informants' own language with its English meaning. A little south, Enemy Creek appears as Toka Kiahe, the river where the enemy appeared on the hill, and the James carries a name that probably means cream-colored tree. Fire Steel is one of the names that survived in translation.

What the plaque says

The site of the junction of two old trails-the "Jimtown"Trail first mail route of the James River Valley and the Fort Thompson Trail much used in the Black Hills gold rush. Close to this junction was Firesteel the pioneer settlement and trading post, 1874-1880. About fifty rods north close to the "Jimtown" Trail is the site of the first frame house in Davison County, built in 1873. This was the home of H. C. Greene and was also the Firesteel postoffice and popular pioneer meeting place. This tablet placed by the Nancy Peabody Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution 1934

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corn Palace — 2.4 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 3.7 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

More markers nearby

• Old Mill Stone — 1.6 mi
• Carl Gunderson: 11th Governor of South Dakota — 2.5 mi
• Indian Medicine Tree — 2.6 mi
• Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church — 8.1 mi