200 Years a Town Fort Pierre has a history of partying, and it doesn’t plan to disappoint anyone in 2017
Story by Katie Hunhoff | Photos by Bernie Hunhoff
Six of last years 15 top rodeo bronc riders rode saddles made by David Dahl, who was had a a shop on Deadwood Street since the 1970s. Dahl, the state’s 1968 saddle bronc champ, makes a saddle a week thanks to a little help from his grandson, Drew Harper. STORY BY KATIE HUNHOFF | PHOTOS BY BERNIE HUNHOFF SOUTH DAKOTA’S OLDEST ORGANIZED town, Fort Pierre, is not resting on its historical laurels; the Missouri River city aims to start its third century with a bang. Two hundred years ago, the site of today’s Fort Pierre became a community of sorts when Joseph LaFramboise opened a trading post at the junction of the Bad and Missouri rivers. It was just 74 years after the Verendrye brothers had buried a lead plate on a nearby bluff claiming the region for France.
Chris Maxwell and Mayor Gloria Hanson, pictured in the renovated railroad depot, are planning Fort Pierre’s bicentennial celebration. 32
Fort LaFramboise eventually fizzled but in 1832 it was rebuilt as Fort Pierre Chouteau, named for a principal owner of the famed American Fur Company. Chouteau’s post prospered for decades, and became the midway meeting place connecting St. Louis with a number of smaller posts to the north and west in today’s Montana and North Dakota. The traders and travelers were a colorful and boisterous bunch. In 1850, French artist M.E. Girardin visited and later wrote a detailed account of a dinner and dance held to celebrate the arrival of a steamboat: “The fires are lighted in the middle of the fort. They make great piles of pancakes over which they pour copious libations. Two violin players, one a Canadian, the other Irish, perched on the top of a barrel, recall to me country weddings in my own land. All take part in the dance: employees, hunters, half-breeds, negroes, mulattoes and Indians; and all these figures, white, yellow, black, copper colored and brick colored, lighted by the reddish flame and excited by a new distribution of whisky, have about them something really diabolical.” Chouteau pioneered the use of steamboats on the long and treacherous Missouri. Though boat captains and crews were befuddled by high water, low water, strong currents and submerged stumps, their cargo of pelts and hides made Chouteau a rich man until the beaver and buffalo began to disappear. By 1855, he was losing money so he sold the site to the U.S. government for use as a frontier army post. Mayor Gloria Hanson puts Fort Pierre’s early history in perspective like this: “Thirty-three years before the Declaration of Independence was signed two French guys claimed it,” she says. “When the fort was established, Napoleon was occupying Europe, the War of 1812 was raging, Lewis and Clark were making their trek, the Louisiana Purchase was being negotiated and then you have Fort Pierre being settled. The history just blows me away,” she says. We met the energetic Hanson on a sunny afternoon at the popular Silver Spur, a legendary rough-and-tumble nightspot that finally closed its doors. It has since reopened as a family-friendly restaurant and steakhouse. An outdoor patio behind the Spur overlooks the Missouri shoreline where Lewis and Clark got a scare from the Teton Sioux in 1804. Flags and a memorial mark the historic encounter in today’s Fischer’s Lilly Park, located at the mouth of the Bad River. Kids were playing in the park and fishing from a footbridge that connects to the historic downtown. Beyond the park, a rodeo was in progress at the Stanley SOUTH DAKOTA MUNICIPALITIES
