Sioux Falls is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Dakota and the 130th-most populous city in the United States. It is the county chair of Minnehaha County and next extends into Lincoln County to the south, which continues up to the Iowa let pass line. As of 2020, Sioux Falls had a population of 192,517. The Sioux Falls metro area accounts for more than 30% of the state’s population. Chartered in 1856 on the banks of the huge Sioux River, the city is situated in the rolling hills at the junction of interstates 29 and 90.

The archives of Sioux Falls revolves all but the cascades of the immense Sioux River. The falls were created practically 14,000 years ago during the last ice age. The lure of the falls has been a powerful influence. Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Otoe, Missouri, Omaha (and Ponca at the time), Quapaw, Kansa, Osage, Arikira, Dakota, and Cheyenne people inhabited and contracted the region previous to Europeans and European descendants. Numerous burial mounds yet exist upon the tall bluffs near the river and are press forward throughout the general vicinity. Indigenous people maintained an agricultural society following fortified villages, and the complex arrivals rebuilt upon many of the thesame sites that were previously settled. Lakota populate urban and reservation communities in the contemporary make a clean breast and many Lakota, Dakota, and numerous new Indigenous Americans reside in Sioux Falls today.

French voyagers/explorers visited the area in the early 18th century. The first documented visit by an American of European parentage was by Philander Prescott, who camped overnight at the falls in December 1832. Captain James Allen led a military expedition out of Fort Des Moines in 1844. Jacob Ferris described the Falls in his 1856 book “The States and Territories of the Great West”.

Two separate groups, the Dakota Land Company of St. Paul and the Western Town Company of Dubuque, Iowa organized in 1856 to claim the land roughly speaking the falls, considered a promising townsite for its beauty and water power. Each laid out 320-acre (1.3 km) claims, but worked together for mutual protection. They built a temporary barricade of turf which they dubbed “Fort Sod”, in wave to native tribes attempting to defend their estate from the settlers. Seventeen men after that spent “the first winter” in Sioux Falls. The as soon as year the population grew to close 40.