“Eminija, Minnesota Territory”

In May of 1857, land speculators from the Dakota Land Company, of St. Paul, Minnesota Territory, surveyed and located the town site of Eminija in this immediate area. Eminija was the Santee Sioux Indian name for the Split Rock River which flows at the base of the hill to the east. The site covered 640 acres, including the junctions of Beaver Creek, the Split Rock and Big Sioux Rivers, all south of this point. Eminija was declared to be ‘the county seat of Vermillion County…on the Sioux River, 13 miles below the Falls and at the more practical head of navigation for large steamers…'

Imaginative reports by land promoters published in the Minnesota press from 1857 through 1861 extolled the virtues of this area: ‘groves of beautiful timber line the river…richer soil cannot be found anywhere…fields of corn and potatoes I have not seen excelled…forests of wild pomegranate, grapes, currants grow in luxuriant abundance…there is a small class of steamers plying the Sioux as high as Eminija…two steam boats are already in the Sioux River trade, from Sioux City to Eminija…there are saw mills running night and day, yet not half the demand can be met…'

Other town sites along the Big Sioux River surveyed by the Dakota Land Company included Medary, Flandreau and Sioux Falls City.

The recorded plat for Eminija, filed in a Minnesota Territory land office, has never been found. The only known reference to the location of the Eminija town site appears in the field notes of Alfred J. Hill, a prominent archaeologist, civil engineer and geographer. He visited this site in 1860, to describe and map it as part of a regional study of Indian mound sites. Hill was guided by Byron M. Smith, the surveyor of the Dakota Land Company who had defined the boundary

line three years earlier. Concerning the site boundaries of Eminija, Hill stated that the north line passed through the largest of the ancient Indian mounds visible to the west.

Dakota Land Company employees built a log cabin on the Eminija town site about 250 yards to the southeast of this spot. Early maps of the area show Eminija located at the juncture of the Split Rock and the Big Sioux Rivers. Several of these maps show stagecoach and wagon roads leading from Eminija to Sioux Falls City, to New Ulm and Blue Earth and following the Big Sioux River south to Sioux City. There was a stage stop at Eminija, but it and other enterprises were short lived. The nation was embroiled in the Civil War; the Sioux War of 1862 brought chaos to the Sioux Valley; and a national election, politically unfavorable to the Company, resulted in its collapse. Eminija became a casualty of rapid and turbulent change on the Dakota frontier.

Dedicated in 1996 by the Minnehaha and South Dakota State Historical Societies, Midcontinent Foundation, Minnehaha County Century Fund, Judge Peder K. and Marge Ecker and Citibank.”

Minnehaha County, SD Hwy 11, 3 miles south of Brandon