One of the first areas in Dakota to be settled was the area along the northern edge of the Missouri River between Sioux City and Yankton. The earliest pioneer settlements in that area included Bon Homme, east of Springfield, Mixville below Fort Randall, Vermillion, Elk Point, and Yankton.
What is now Lincoln County does not appear to have a permanent white settlement until some years later. Though the county was carved out and named in 1862, there were a very few scattered settlers who established a residence in that section of Dakota in 1864.
While Yankton was the first point occupied by a permanent settlement of whites on the Missouri slope in Dakota, the country opposite Fort Randall contained a number of white men, no soldiers, who had probably come as civilian employes with the Harney expedition in 1855 and had located in that vicinity in 1857.
These folks located in the area near Fort Randall for the purpose of sharing in the wood and hay contracts that were annually given out, or to engage in hauling supplies and equipment for the Government.
In 1858 Minnesota was admitted as a state with its current boundaries. That portion of Minnesota lying west of the Missouri River, was without a government. This fact will explain the urgency of the early settlers to secure the organization of the Dakota Territory. The first settlement in the future Dakota Territory by citizens of the United States was made at Pembina about 1843 just south of the Canadian border.
The 17th of March, 1862, was a pleasant and cloudless sky in Yankton. At high noon on that eventful Monday the members elect of the two houses assembled at Yankton, the councilmen resorting to their chamber in a new frame building on the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Broadway, and the representatives gathering at the log structure erected by the citizens of Yankton for the use of the Episcopal parish near the northwest corner of Fourth and Linn Streets.
The two houses were thus within convenient proximity. The organization of the two bodies, the council and House of Representatives, had been prearranged, and had been made with the question of location of the capitol of the territory as the governing factor. The aspirants for this favor were Yankton and Vermillion, with Sioux Falls a “dark horse.” The members of the council were all present. They had been chosen by districts as defined by the proclamation of the governor, and there were no contested seats.
A two-story hotel with livery barn housed the center of Missouri Valley Culture on the Bon Homme County side of lower Chouteau Creek, slightly more than a mile from is confluence with the Missouri River. Through the last four decades of the nineteenth century the place went by several names under changing ownership.
It was first known as the Tackett Station, named after George L. Tackett, the first proprietor of the property. He was an immigrant of French extraction who arrived at Sioux City in 1856, took as his first wife a Native American, and because of the marriage spoke several Indian dialects as well as English and French. In 1858 Tackett became the sheriff of Woodbury County, Iowa.
Soon he took as his second wife a non-Indian, and on June 24, 1861, accepted appointment by Dakota territorial Governor William Jayne as Justice of Peace with the charge of establishing law and order along the eastern edge of the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Trials took place on the grounds or in the lobby of the hotel. According to local sources, Tackett hanged the worst offenders from a nearby tree, on which he cut a notch after every execution and buried their remains on the hotel grounds.
More than a century later Yankton tribal elders still warned that the spirits of Tackett’s victims hovered about, and haunted the place at night in protest against his brand of pioneer justice. The hotel building contained a stagecoach station, post office, country store, saloon, gambling room, and lodging facilities.
Quickly, to tribal members his facility became a meeting ground for Indian-White relations, and to non-Indians a way station and recreational center. By 1872 three of eight stage coach lines carried passengers between Yankton and Fort Randall made daily stops. Soldiers came down from Fort Randall. Settlers slipped away from their farmsteads to Tackett Station for an escape from toil and boredom.
Yankton tribal elder Joseph Rockboy reminisced while he surveyed the property for nomination to the national register of historical sites in the 1970s. On the first floor of the hotel he remembered a lobby, dining room, post office, general store, and business office. On the second floor near the head of a narrow stairway, at the west end, there was a gambling room. The floor still bore impressions to indicate the location of tables and chairs, and the ceiling some patches that covered bullet holes. Along a hallway were doors to tiny rooms, on which numbers assigned to guests still remained visible.
Through approximately four decades, “Chouteau Creek Station” flourished not only as an urban center for area resident and overland travelers, but also as an important way station for steamboats that docked at the mouth of “Chouteau Creek.” Here they dropped passengers, merchandise, spirituous beverages, and entertainers as they took on cargo and passengers for transportation further upstream.
Editor’s note: This Facebook post (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php/?story_fbid=1124249159091738&id=100045199937468) claims to picture the tree George Tackett used for hanging executions, as well as that Bob Barker is his descendant. We did not independently verify the FB post information.
Author Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on January 8, 2025