An aerial view of the flatiron-shaped Coteau des Prairies plateau, dusted with snow, rising above the patchwork farmland around it
Doc Searls / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
South Dakota · Region

The Glacial Lakes & the Northeast

The Coteau des Prairies and its glacial lakes, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate's Lake Traverse homeland, Fort Sisseton, and the Ingalls family's De Smet.

4 places to explore

When the last ice sheet melted off the northeast it left a high wedge of land, the Coteau des Prairies, scattered with lakes and potholes. The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Dakota people, hold the Lake Traverse Reservation along its northern edge, set aside by treaty in 1867, and govern from Agency Village. Fort Sisseton, built on the coteau in 1864 to watch the Dakota after the war in Minnesota, still stands in brick and fieldstone around its parade ground, and nearby Sica Hollow carries a Dakota word for bad.

The railroads brought homesteaders in the 1880s. The Ingalls family came to De Smet in 1879, Charles Ingalls filed his claim the next year, and his daughter Laura set the later Little House books there, The Long Winter among them; the surveyors' house and the homestead are open. In Aberdeen, L. Frank Baum ran a store and then a weekly newspaper, and in December 1890 and January 1891 his editorials called for the extermination of the Lakota, the second written days after Wounded Knee. His descendants came to Pine Ridge in 2006 to apologize.

Brookings, on the eastern edge, keeps the state university, and Watertown sits between two glacial lakes of its own.

What to See in The Glacial Lakes & the Northeast

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Sica Hollow State Park

Sisseton

Wooded ravines on the edge of the Coteau, on the Lake Traverse Reservation, where the springs run iron-red and the Dakota tell of a good land gone bad.

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Historic Sites

The two-story brick hospital at Fort Sisseton with its columned porch and rooftop lookout, under shade trees

Fort Sisseton Historic State Park

Britton

A stone fort on the Coteau des Prairies built to watch the Dakota after 1862, renamed for the Sisseton who scouted for it, restored by the WPA and saved again by a boy who grew up loving it.

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The white clapboard Surveyors' House in De Smet, where the Ingalls family spent the winter of 1879 to 1880, now kept by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in town

Ingalls Homestead and the De Smet Historic Homes

De Smet

The quarter section a mile from De Smet that Charles Ingalls filed on in 1880 and proved up in 1886, the house in town he built, and the cottonwoods he planted.

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Joseph N. Nicollet Tower and Interpretive Center

Sisseton

A tower on the edge of the Coteau des Prairies honoring the French mapmaker who drew this country in 1838 and 1839 and kept the Dakota names on the map.

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Stories from The Glacial Lakes & the Northeast

Nature

The Long Winter in the Records

Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter tells of seven months of blizzards that cut De Smet off from the world in 1880 and 1881. A meteorologist checked the book against the weather data, and found that Wilder had not exaggerated.

5 min read

The Glacial Lakes & the Northeast rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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