The Grand River & the Northwest
The Grand River where Sitting Bull was born and killed, his grave above the Missouri, Hugh Glass's grizzly, and the Slim Buttes on the open northwestern prairie.
This is the emptiest corner of the state, shortgrass and buttes running out to the Montana line, and the homeland of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock nations. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, governed from Eagle Butte, brings together four Lakota bands, the Mnicoujou, Itazipco, Sihasapa and Oohenunpa. Standing Rock straddles the North Dakota line along the Grand River.
Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, Sitting Bull, was born on the Grand River and died there. On December 15, 1890, two weeks before Wounded Knee, Indian police sent to arrest him at his cabin shot him in a fight that killed eight of the police and seven of his people. The army buried him at Fort Yates; in 1953 relatives and Mobridge businessmen dug up the grave and reburied what they found on a bluff across the Missouri from Mobridge, and whether the bones are his is still argued.
Farther west, near the forks of the Grand where Shadehill Reservoir now sits, a grizzly mauled the fur trapper Hugh Glass in 1823; his companions left him for dead, and he made his way some two hundred miles to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri. In the Slim Buttes in September 1876, soldiers hunting the victors of the Little Bighorn attacked the camp of the Lakota leader American Horse, who died of his wounds there.
What to See in The Grand River & the Northwest
5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Roadside Stops
Scenic Drives through The Grand River & the Northwest
Stories from The Grand River & the Northwest
The Dinosaur in Trust
In 1990 a fossil hunter found the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex yet known in a bluff on a Cheyenne River rancher's land. Who owned it took the FBI, the courts and Sotheby's to decide.
The Lakes That Came Up the River
Between the 1940s and the 1960s the Pick-Sloan dams turned the Missouri in the Dakotas into a chain of reservoirs. The bottomlands they drowned were the best land the river nations had left.
The Grand River & the Northwest rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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