Historical Marker · No. 118
Rapid City Founders Camp Site
Pennington County · South Dakota
Erected by Minnelusa Pioneer Ass'n., Pennington County Commissioners and State Highway Commission, 1955
The eleven men named here camped by Rapid Creek on February 24, 1876, and laid out their mile-square town the next day on land the 1868 treaty still guaranteed to the Lakota; Congress took it a year later without the consent the treaty required. John R. Brennan, who cut his name in the cliff, prospered with the town as its first hotelkeeper and postmaster. From 1900 to 1917 he ran the Pine Ridge agency, and his papers there hold its census and allotment records. The register still lists this bronze at Halley Park.
What the plaque says
Rapid City Founders Camp Site Near a perpendicular sandstone cliff a short distance North of here and across Rapid Creek (a marker denotes the site) was the first camp of those hardy pioneers who founded Rapid City. Here John R. Brennan, Martin Persinger, Thomas Ferguson, W. P. Martin, Albert Brown, William Marston, Samuel Scott, the surveyor, J. W. Allen, James Carney, Major Hutchinson and William Nuttal made their camp on February 24, 1876 and the name of Brennan, where he carved it in the sandstone cliff, is still to be seen. The following day the town site, a mile square, was laid out by these men under the direction of Samuel Scott. One of the pioneer writers of the period said: "As makers of the history of the West, their names will be handed down to posterity while summer clouds shall wrap old Harney's Brow and Black Hills waters run down to the sea." Erected 1955 by Minnelusa Pioneer Ass'n., Pennington County Commissioners and State Highway Commission
Where it stands
44.08464, -103.24297 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- The Journey Museum and Learning Center — 1.2 miFour collections under one roof in downtown Rapid City, among them the federal Sioux Indian Museum, founded in 1939 to keep Lakota art in Lakota country.
- Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 18 miFour faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.
- 1880 Train — 19 miA steam excursion on a mining branch line that hauled gear for Mount Rushmore, named for a decade it never ran in by a man who wanted steam to survive.
- Black Elk Peak — 21 miThe highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.