Historic Highway - Brule

The road on this bronze was meant to run from Minnesota to South Pass in the Rockies, and it stopped at the Missouri a few miles from here. Congress funded it on July 22, 1856. Under William H. Nobles, crews in 1857 laid out about 255 miles from Fort Ridgely to the river near present Chamberlain; the planned line up the White River to South Pass was never built. Prairie fires slowed the work, and so did the Ihanktonwan (Yankton), who asked to be paid for a road through country they did not cede until April 1858.

What the plaque says

Historic Highway The Fort Ridgely and South Pass Federal Wagon Road, surveyed and mounded in 1857 crossed here from NE to SW. First public road in the South Dakota area. Erected 1956 by M. A. Brown and State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dignity of Earth and Sky — 3.0 mi
  A fifty-foot stainless-steel Lakota woman on the bluff above the Missouri, her star quilt made of 128 blue diamonds that shiver in the wind.
• Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center — 5.3 mi
  A museum on the campus of a Catholic boarding school for Lakota children founded in 1927, built from gifts of the school's alumni and named to honor the people.

More markers nearby

• Lewis and Clark Memorial Bridge at Chamberlain — 3.0 mi
• Chamberlain — 4.6 mi
• American Island — 4.9 mi
• White River — 12 mi