South Dakota History
Sodbusters and Pioneers Like a wave on a prairie ocean, immigrants to the American frontier kept pushing westward in search of unbroken ground and a lease on the future. Most of those who came into South Dakota in the mid-nineteenth century followed the route of trappers and traders, heading west out of St. Louis and north through Nebraska via the Missouri River. They settled first in the southeastern corner of the state, in Vermillion, Yankton, and Sioux Falls, fanning out and building their homesteads along waterways: the Big Sioux, Vermillion, James, and Choteau rivers. Their vision for a new life included farms and houses, and to their eyes the land they first encountered was empty.
In 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Homestead Act and sold 160 acres of unsettled land (for about 18 dollars in parts of the Dakota Territory) to men and women willing to meet a few government requirements. Once a pioneer had paced off 160 acres as his claim, the government compelled him to complete several steps to "prove up" -- or hold onto -- his claim. The first order of business was to construct a dwelling. Due to a lack of building materials, early dwellings were most often tarpaper shacks, dugouts carved from swells in the land, or sod shanties. "Sodbusters" cut long strips of three-inch (7.6-cm)-deep sod with a spade and then sliced the strips into manageable lengths. These were stacked like bricks into four walls, with openings for a window and a door. If the settler was lucky, trees growing on banks of a nearby stream or creek would provide enough wood to construct a crudely framed roof strong enough to support more sod. The completed sod shanty was windproof, fireproof, and structurally sound,
but it often failed to keep out rain.
Though few of these original structures can be found today, they once littered the landscape. The large number that were built, only to be summarily abandoned, provided mute testimony to the struggles of trying to make a life on a vast, treeless prairie, broiling hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, and for the most part, arid.
The deep, impacted prairie grasses rendered planting the first crops extremely difficult. No matter how sharp their blades, plows could rarely churn up earth so entangled with tough roots. After chopping at the earth with an ax, many settlers simply dropped seeds into the crevices, then waited in their little "soddies" for the grain to grow. If the first crop was spared by drought, hail, grasshoppers, and fire, a homesteader might have enough money by the end of the summer to buy seed to plant a few additional acres. With luck, the cultivated acreage would increase each year, allowing the family to grow a vegetable garden, buy a milk cow, purchase lumber for a real house, and get shoes for the children. The success of these pioneer families often relied as much on their own ability to endure in the face of solitude and misfortune as it did on the weather.
