On April 19, 1858, the names -- or rather X's -- of 15 Yankton Sioux leaders were affixed to a treaty ceding some 14 million acres of tribal land to the federal government for approximately $1,600,000 in annuities and other considerations. The area acquired was west of the Big Sioux River and north of the Missouri, lying south of a line that ran roughly from Fort Pierre to Lake Kampeska.

The effect of that document, signed for the United States by Commissioner Charles E. Mix and ratified by the Senate on Feb. 17, 1859, was to open for settlement and speculation by white opportunists the eastern portion of what became Dakota Territory.

Awaiting congressional approval of the treaty and the departure of the Indians, a small contingent of young men marked time on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, eager to capitalize on the geographical bonanza.

They were located opposite the campground of a Sioux band headed by one of the signatories of the treaty, Struck-by-the-Ree. The site, alongside a small stream eventually named Rhine Creek, was to become the future town of Yankton, the territory's Mother City.

Twenty-three-year-old Joseph R. Hanson was the unofficial leader of the party anxious to stake claims when the Senate acted. Before that time, he periodically crossed the river and made friends with Old Strike, concurrently familiarizing himself with the region which he and fellow '59ers would soon be settling.

But there were others on the scene even sooner.

Another Nebraska-based party headed by W. P. and C. J. Holman (father and son, respectively) floated logs across the Missouri and built a cabin on the Yankton site. The Indians burned it down.

George D. Fiske, a representative of Frost, Todd and Company, operated a trading post in a tent, doing business with the Indians and travelers on the military trail between Sioux City and Fort Randall. He was succeeded by William Penn Lyman, who built more lasting facilities; and because it was advantageous to them, the Sioux permitted Lyman's operation to continue.

Even before the treaty received the Senate's okay, a surveying party arrived to plat the grants awarded to the Upper Missouri Land Company (Frost-Todd) and to Charles Francois Picotte, a mixed-blood tribal member who received 640 acres "outside the reservation" for his "achieving the cession." The Indians were confused and angered by the white men with their chains, stakes and a strange looking-glass on three legs, but there was little they could do to thwart the effort.

Picotte selected a major portion of Struck-by-the-Ree's village, and with that decision he became the first dominant owner of a new settlement which, for a time, was known unofficially as "Charlie's Town." This was, in effect, the genesis of Yankton, which got its name from a corruption of the Indian term I-hank-ton-wan, meaning "village at the end."

All in all, some 892 acres -- stretching along the Missouri from present-day Summit Street to Ferdig Avenue and northward generally to the creek bluffs -- constituted the original townsite holdings. Soon the land was surveyed into building lots, and a white man's village began to pop up where Indian camp fires had burned just a short time previously.

Building was not a simple matter. A sawmill had not yet been erected, so lumber of any kind had to be hauled in, primarily from North Bend, Neb., 35 miles away. Since the immediate area was almost treeless, except for the virtually useless river willows and a few small stands of cottonwood, logs had to be floated across the Missouri or dragged in by oxen from the bottoms. Yankton's first buildings, then, were crude and unpretentious, with dirt floors and sod roofs.

Among the earliest arrivals was Downer T. Bramble, a 25-year-old Vermonter, who erected a frame structure near the riverfront and opened a general store. Capt. John Blair Smith Todd built a small office at Second and Broadway, and a block farther north Henry Clay Ash put up a log house and began operating a tavern.

With those few embryonic developments, Yankton (which would not be officially incorporated until May 8, 1862) became a functioning reality, envisioned by its founders to grow into a prairie metropolis, a new Chicago.

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Originally published March 7, 1994