Fort Randall

General William S. Harney chose this bench on the west bank of the Missouri for a fort in 1856 and named it for an army paymaster, Daniel Randall. For more than thirty years it was the army's anchor on the middle river, sending troops and supplies up the Missouri for one campaign after another. Its most famous resident was a prisoner. After Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881, the army brought him downriver by steamboat, and from July 1881 until November 1883 he and his band of 158 Hunkpapa Lakota were camped south of the fort under loose guard before being sent to Standing Rock.

In 1875 soldiers of the post who belonged to the Odd Fellows lodge wanted a meeting room and combined it with a church and a library. The post carpenter, a discharged soldier named George Bush, designed it, and the men built it themselves of chalkstone sawn by hand from nearby quarries, the government helping only with quarrying and hauling. When the fort was abandoned in 1892, every other building and its contents were sold at auction and carried away by settlers. The chapel stayed.

Two windstorms and a bolt of lightning took the roof, and rain and frost went to work on the walls. The Army Corps of Engineers, building Fort Randall Dam a short way upstream, stabilized the ruin in 1953, and a protective structure now stands over it. Foundation ruins and cellar holes still outline the parade ground, and a walk around it shows how large the post once was.