Sherman Park Indian Burial Mounds

These are graves, raised around 400 CE by Woodland people whose descendants were most likely the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, not the Dakota, who reached the falls in the mid-1700s. Edwin A. Sherman bought this bluff in 1886, and in 1910 he and his wife Katherine gave the city 52 acres with five mounds on them. In 1962 City Commissioner Earl McCart asked the University of South Dakota to dig. One mound was destroyed, and in 2001 the county historical society raised a fifth, the westernmost, in its place. Visitors are asked to be respectful here.

What the plaque says

Sherman Park Indian Burial Mounds In these mounds were buried the physical remains of Indians who lived in eastern South Dakota 1600 years ago. Radiocarbon testing established the time of the burials. Known to archaeologists as the Woodland Indians, they moved westward from the eastern forests, changing from deer hunting to the pursuit of buffalo on the vast Dakota grasslands. As hunters they lived in temporary shelters but left these mounds as permanent monuments to their dead. Later, Dacotah and other Indians roamed this area, also burying their dead in these same mounds. In 1962 the University of South Dakota excavated the second mound from the east. In it were found the skeletons of four Woodland Indians and a later adult burial. Also found was the skeleton of a horse, probably buried within the last 100 years. Fragments of cooking pots were scattered among the remains of the Woodland Indians. Only the skulls and large bones of the Woodland Indians were buried. As was the custom with many of the Plains Indians, the dead were first laid on scaffolds and at a later date the largest bones were buried in the earth. Erected 1963 by the S. F. Park Board and the S. F. Chamber of Commerce

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Falls Park — 2.7 mi
  The falls a town company came for in 1856, abandoned in 1862, and tried to make pay with a seven-story quartzite mill that ran for barely two years.

More markers nearby

• An Institution of Organized Kindness — 1.0 mi
• Soo Skyways Airport — 1.7 mi
• U.S. Senator R.F. Pettigrew — 1.7 mi
• West Sioux Falls — 1.7 mi