The falls of the Big Sioux River tumbling over pink quartzite in Falls Park, with downtown Sioux Falls beyond
Maxpower2727 / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
South Dakota · Region

Sioux Falls & the Southeast

The falls of the Big Sioux over pink quartzite, Mitchell's Corn Palace, Yankton on the free-flowing Missouri, and Spirit Mound where Lewis and Clark climbed.

5 places to explore

The southeast is the country the Ihanktonwan, the Yankton people, gave up in the treaty of 1858, some eleven million acres between the Big Sioux and the Missouri, keeping a reservation along the river around Wagner and Lake Andes. The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, Dakota people who came west after the 1862 war in Minnesota, have held land on the Big Sioux at Flandreau since 1869.

Sioux Falls grew around the falls of the Big Sioux River, where the water drops over ledges of pink Sioux quartzite, the same stone that built much of the old downtown. Yankton was the capital of Dakota Territory from 1861, and below Gavins Point Dam the Missouri runs free again for some sixty miles, sandbars and cottonwoods as Lewis and Clark saw them. North of Vermillion they climbed Spirit Mound in August 1804, a hill the Yankton, Omaha and Otoe said was guarded by little people with arrows; it is a prairie preserve now.

At Mitchell the Corn Palace is redecorated every year with murals made of corn, and on the edge of town people living in earth lodges farmed above a creek around a thousand years ago; the village is still being excavated.

What to See in Sioux Falls & the Southeast

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

Historic Sites

The Big Sioux River pouring through channels in blocky pink quartzite at Falls Park

Falls Park

Sioux Falls

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.

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The glass entrance of the Thomsen Center Archeodome, the building over the excavation at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village

Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village

Mitchell

A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

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A mown path through restored prairie grass leading toward the low green summit of Spirit Mound

Spirit Mound Historic Prairie

Vermillion

A lone hill north of Vermillion that Lewis and Clark walked to on a scorching day in 1804, now one of the few places left where you can stand exactly where they stood.

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Towns & Gateways

A sitar, a peacock-headed stringed instrument and other folk instruments in a gallery case at the National Music Museum

National Music Museum

Vermillion

One of the great collections of musical instruments in the world, on a college campus in a prairie town, built around a band teacher's thousands of horns, fiddles and curiosities.

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Architecture

The Mitchell Corn Palace in 2007, its onion domes and minarets above walls covered in rodeo murals made of corn

Corn Palace

Mitchell

The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.

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Scenic Drives through Sioux Falls & the Southeast

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 Sioux Falls & the Southeast

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

Sioux Falls & the Southeast rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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