The Rosebud Reservation was carved out of the Great Sioux Reservation in 1889, the homeland of the Sicangu Lakota under Spotted Tail's successors. Within a dozen years the government wanted part of it back. In 1901 an Indian inspector, James McLaughlin, negotiated an agreement for the eastern portion, in what is now Gregory County, for a fixed sum. Congress changed the terms before ratifying it in April 1904, so that the nation would be paid only as settlers paid for each tract, and by then the Supreme Court had ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that Congress could take such land without a tribe's consent at all.
The rush
There were 2,412 quarter sections, about 385,000 acres in all, and far too many people wanted them for the old first-come rush. So the government held a lottery. From July 5 to July 23, 1904, anyone eligible for a homestead could register at one of four towns, Yankton, Chamberlain, Fairfax and Bonesteel, and on July 28 names would be drawn to set the order in which the winners could choose their land.
The railroad had reached Bonesteel in 1902, and it took the biggest crowds outside Yankton. Trains ran day and night; the town filled with tents, restaurants and land locators, and with gamblers, con men and thieves come to work the crowd. On July 20, citizens who tried to run the worst of them out of town traded gunfire with them in what local history calls the Battle of Bonesteel. Registration closed with 106,308 names, for odds of about one in forty-four.
The towns
Entries began at Bonesteel on August 8, and settlers spread across the county to build claim shacks and prove up. New towns went up almost overnight; Burke, the county seat, was founded on August 4, before the first claims were even filed, and named for Charles H. Burke, a South Dakota congressman. The openings went on: Tripp County in 1908, and in 1911 a drawing at Gregory for more Rosebud land and part of Pine Ridge.
What it left
For the Sicangu, the openings meant white towns and farms on land the nation had never agreed to sell on those terms, and a reservation broken into a patchwork of tribal, allotted and settler land. In 1977, in Rosebud Sioux Tribe v. Kneip, the Supreme Court held that the openings had not just sold land within the reservation but shrunk the reservation itself, leaving Gregory, Tripp, Lyman and Mellette counties outside it. The tribe's government, Sinte Gleska University and Spotted Tail's grave lie to the west, in Todd County, which remains the heart of the reservation. Gregory County's own story starts at Fort Randall, on its eastern edge.