Lake Francis Case, the Missouri River reservoir, seen over cedars and grassy bluffs from the Snake Creek Recreation Area
Chris Light / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
South Dakota · Region

The Rosebud & the South Central Plains

The Sicangu Lakota homeland of the Rosebud, Spotted Tail's grave, Sinte Gleska University, St. Francis Mission, and the long stretch of US-83 south from Murdo.

5 places to explore

The Rosebud Reservation is the homeland of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, the Burnt Thigh people, whose government sits at Rosebud. Under Sinte Gleska, Spotted Tail, the Sicangu were moved again and again after the 1868 treaty before they settled on this country along the upper White River and its creeks. Spotted Tail was killed by Crow Dog in 1881 and is buried at Rosebud. The university the tribe chartered at Mission in 1970 carries his name and teaches the Lakota language and the nation's own history.

Spotted Tail and the Oglala leader Red Cloud asked for Jesuit teachers, and the Jesuits built St. Francis Mission southwest of Rosebud in the 1880s. Father Eugene Buechel, who came there in 1902 and spent decades writing down Lakota words, left the collection that is now the mission's Lakota museum.

North of the reservation the land rolls out to I-90 at Murdo, where a car museum sits beside the interstate, and US-83 runs north and south across the whole of it with long miles between towns. Winner, to the east, is the market town for the ranch country of Tripp and Gregory counties.

What to See in The Rosebud & the South Central Plains

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

Historic Sites

The roofless chalkstone walls and gables of the 1875 Fort Randall chapel, behind a low fence on the grass

Fort Randall

Pickstown

The ruined stone chapel of an 1856 Missouri River post below Fort Randall Dam, where Sitting Bull and his band were held as prisoners for two years.

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Spotted Tail Gravesite

Rosebud

The grave of the Sicangu leader whose killing by Crow Dog in 1881 went to the Supreme Court and ended with Congress taking criminal law away from the nations.

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Towns & Gateways

Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum

St. Francis

A Jesuit's half-century of Lakota words, plants and photographs, gathered with Lakota catechists on the Rosebud and kept where the objects were made and used.

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Sinte Gleska University

Mission

A university the Rosebud Sioux Tribe built in 1970 to teach its own language and history, with its own bison herd and the tribe's archives on campus.

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Roadside Stops

Mid-century cars and old neon and enamel signs crowded inside a building at the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo

Pioneer Auto Show

Murdo

Forty-odd buildings of old cars, tractors, motorcycles and everything else a Murdo car dealer and his sons couldn't stop buying, a block off I-90 since 1954.

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Scenic Drives through The Rosebud & the South Central Plains

Scenic Byway

I-90: Sioux Falls to the Badlands

About 378 miles across South Dakota on I-90 from the falls of the Big Sioux to the edge of the Black Hills: the Corn Palace, Dignity above the Missouri, a car museum in Murdo, a Minuteman silo, the Badlands Loop and the free ice water at Wall.

378 mi · 7 hrs

Stories from The Rosebud & the South Central Plains

History

The Land Lottery at Bonesteel

In July 1904 more than a hundred thousand people registered for a chance at 2,412 homesteads cut from the Rosebud Reservation. The drawing filled the plains with towns, and decided the shape of the reservation that remains.

5 min read
History

The Treaty and the Quarry

In 1858 the Ihanktonwan gave up most of what is now eastern South Dakota. Their leader, Struck by the Ree, would not sign until the treaty guaranteed his people the sacred pipestone quarry in Minnesota.

5 min read

The Rosebud & the South Central Plains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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