Pierre South Dakota

What a fascinating town! Pierre is the capital of the state, and therefore is home to the 1910 capitol building. It has a population of only about 14,000 folk, so is tiny by city standards. But because it is the legislative center of the state, it has more services and amenities than you would normally find in a town of this size.

The total absence of security was astounding! We walked in the door of the capitol building and did not have to walk through any metal detectors or even talk to an attendant of any kind. The mansion of the Governor of the state is across a small lake from the capitol building. The grounds are not secured in any way, other than the small signs on the driveway that indicate that it is a “private residential driveway”.

We made our way to the confluence of the Bad River with the Missouri River. On September 24-28, 1804, the Corps of Discover along with Merriweather Lewis and William Clark reached this confluence. This was the Corps first encounter with the Lakota, known to them as the Teton Sioux. Because they had nobody who spoke Lakota, and the Lakota had no prior exposure to English, this first meeting resulted in a hostile battle. Lewis and Clark were able to quickly calm down the skirmish and eventually wrote in their diaries of a productive first encounter.

Pierre’s location on the Missouri is spectacular. We had lunch at a marina restaurant that was right on the river. The server was just beaming at how lucky she was to work there. She looked out the window at the Missouri, the highway of Lewis and Clark, and waxed about how she probably had the best view of anywhere in South Dakota. From what I can tell, I can’t imagine there is one better.

Deer at sunrise overlooking the Missouri River. We are staying at River View RV Park, and the RV Park could not have a more appropriate name. We have a panoramic view of what Lewis and Clark had experienced, however the bridges and buildings weren’t here in the early 1800’s.

We stumbled into Pierre – Fort Pierre to be exact, which is on the other side of the Missouri – on the weekend of their bicentennial. Apparently Fort Pierre was originally founded in the fall of 1917, and we scurried around all the bicentennial activities.  We also stumbled on the original site of Fort Pierre Choteau. A trading post built by John Jacob Astor in 1832, it quickly became the most strategic post in the Western Division of the American Fur Company.

Pierre continued to show us it has been a vortex of western development in the US. On March 30, 1743, Chevalier and Louis la Verendrye claimed the entire watershed of the Missouri River for France. To memorialize their claim, the Verendrye brothers buried a lead plate embossed on one side with their claim to the Missouri valley, and hand etched on the back with their names. The plate was discovered sticking out of the ground on this site by some high school students in 1913.

We learned that the National Park Service keeps website information on structures that are on the National Register of Historic Places, even if those properties are not under their management. We found the Brink-Wegner House in Pierre, built in 1904, a shingle style home that is one of the best period interiors in the entire state. Andrew Brink was one of the most prominent real estate brokers and contractors of the time. In 1923, Henry Wegner bought the home. It remains a private residence to this day.

I thought that Steve Wynn and the great minds that run the Las Vegas strip had all the angles figured out. But I guess you have to visit South Dakota to get an inkling into the way a casino property needs to be marketed. Genius!

Talk to you soon!