Before 1858, the country between the Big Sioux and the Missouri, most of what is now eastern South Dakota, belonged to the Ihanktonwan, the Yankton, the people of the end village. Their principal chief in the middle of the century was a man the treaty records name Pa-la-ne-a-pa-pe, the man struck by the Ree, known in English as Struck by the Ree. A story says that when Lewis and Clark met the Ihanktonwan at Calumet Bluff on the Missouri in 1804, they wrapped a newborn boy in an American flag, and that the boy was him. Whether or not it happened, it describes the course he chose: peace with the newcomers, on the best terms he could get.
The delegation
By the 1850s settlers and speculators were pressing west from Iowa and Minnesota, and town companies were already staking the falls of the Big Sioux. Struck by the Ree and other headmen went to Washington in the winter of 1857 to negotiate. On April 19, 1858, they signed a treaty that gave up some eleven million acres, nearly all of their land, for about $1.6 million in annuities spread over fifty years, along with promises of schools, farming help and protection. The Ihanktonwan kept a reservation of roughly 400,000 acres on the north bank of the Missouri, in what is now Charles Mix County, not far from Fort Randall. Returning home, he told his people that the white men were coming in like maggots, that it was useless to resist them, and that they were too many to stop.
Article 8
One clause mattered to him more than the money. The red pipestone quarry in southwestern Minnesota, a hundred and fifty miles from the new reservation, had been worked by many nations for centuries, and the Ihanktonwan controlled it. Other Dakota bands had signed it away in their own treaties of 1851 without the Ihanktonwan's consent. Struck by the Ree refused to sign unless his people kept free and unrestricted use of the quarry, and Article 8 gave them a reservation one mile square around it.
The government spent the next seventy years chipping at that promise. A railroad crossed the quarry reserve, and in the 1890s an Indian boarding school was built on it over the tribe's protests. After long legal fights, the Ihanktonwan gave up title in the late 1920s for payment while keeping the right to quarry, and in 1937 the site became Pipestone National Monument, where only Native people may quarry the stone today.
What followed
The Ihanktonwan moved to their reservation in July 1859. Within two years the ceded land had become Dakota Territory, with its capital at Yankton, and the homesteaders came. The country Lewis and Clark crossed in 1804 on the way to Spirit Mound was farms within a generation, and the reservation itself was later cut down by allotment and sale. The treaty is still remembered: a monument the tribe raised in 1907 names the chiefs who signed it.