“The Rosebud Country”

Between the White and Niobrara Rivers is a rolling, well grassed prairie, dotted with isolated buttes and cut by tree bordered water courses. The soil is sufficiently sandy to retain moisture and springs and flowing streams result.

Colton’s 1873 Map shows Rosebud Creek. By 1878 the Indian Commissioner was calling it the Rosebud Country. A profusion of wild roses also was a factor. In early times it was visited by the Pawnee, Kiowa and Ponca from the South; the Cheyenne and Arapaho from the West. About 1760 the Lakota, or Teton Sioux, pushed in from the East and it became the home territory of the Oglalla and Brule Sioux bands.

In 1868, at Ft. Laramie, the Great Sioux Reservation, all of what is now South Dakota west of the Missouri, was created. Agencies were set up on the Missouri and that of Spotted Tail and Swift Bird was at the mouth of Whetstone Creek, a picturesque Rosebud Country watershed. There, Spotted Tail killed Big Mouth and too many whiskey dealers caused Spot to take his people West, away from the river. In 1877 the government moved Spot back to Ponca Creek. By 1879 he had moved up river to Rosebud Landing and then out to Rosebud Agency, which with Pine Ridge, steamboats to the Landing and wagon trains overland supplied.

The Reservation was set back from the river to the 99th meridian near Bonesteel in 1889. In 1902 the railroad from Nebraska reached Bonesteel and in 1904, Dallas. In 1904, that area was opened to settlement and 109,308 persons registered for 2,412 claims, a ratio of 46 to 1. It was then that the ROSEBUD COUNTRY became well known to the world. In 1908 Tripp County was opened with 114,769 registrants for 4,000 claims.

Those land openings were fabulous affairs, wild and rough. The Battle of Bonesteel, on 20 July 1904, with several killed and wounded was climatic. In 1911 Mellette and Bennett counties were opened. And that’s a brief story of Rosebud.

Gregory County, east of end of park in Gregory (2006)