In This Issue
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BOOK EXCERPT | A New Deal for South Dakota: Drought, Depression, and Relief, 1920-1941
This excerpt focuses on the political, economic and natural environment in South Dakota from the end of World War I to the onset of the Great Depression. In those years, South Dakotans faced economic and environmental disaster. To survive, many turned to the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lee is professor emeritus of history at the University of South Dakota and specializes in the political history of the Northern Great Plains. A New Deal for South Dakota by R. Alton Lee can be purchased for $24.95 at sdhspress.com . Articles in South Dakota History , the quarterly journal of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, are free to researchers and readers online once they are over ten years old, prior to that the issue can be purchased for $10.00, plus shipping and handling. Contact (605) 773-6009 for additional information.
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DAKOTA IMAGE | Matilda Picotte Galpin
Lakota trader and educator Matilda Picotte Galpin—known for much of her life as Wambdi Autepewin, or “Eagle Woman That All Look At”—earned a reputation as an intermediary between Indians and whites on the Upper Missouri River. Eagle Woman was born in 1820 near the Big Bend of the Missouri southeast of present-day Pierre to a Two Kettle father and a Hunkpapa mother. She married Honorè Picotte, a prominent American Fur Company trader, in 1838. Picotte retired to Saint Louis and his white family a little over a decade later. One of his protégés, Charles E. Galpin, married Eagle Woman in 1850. As Galpin’s only wife, Eagle Woman took on a significant role in his business affairs, traveling as far upriver as Fort Benton to trade with local tribes. Because of her fur-trade experience, Eagle Woman encouraged cross-cultural understanding. She urged Indians to work with white settlers and insisted that government officials and private traders deal fairly with tribes. In 1868, she aided Father Pierre-Jean De Smet in convincing the Lakota leader Sitting Bull to participate in negotiations over the Fort Laramie Treaty. When De Smet baptized her later that year, she took the name Matilda Picotte Galpin. Following her husband’s death in 1869, she assumed control of his trading post, and gained renown for her generosity toward the Lakotas who faced dwindling resources following their move to the Great Sioux Reservation. Galpin accompanied a cadre of Lakota leaders to Washington, D.C., and New York City in 1872 on a tour that federal officials hoped would showcase the power of the Americans and discourage Indians from leaving the reservation. In 1876, alongside the eldest of her four daughters, Louise, she helped establish the region’s first Catholic Indian day school at Standing Rock. While Galpin encouraged the Lakotas to adopt American norms, she opposed the treaty that ceded the Black Hills, formalized as the Agreement of 1877. Galpin died at her daughter Alma’s ranch near Cannonball, North Dakota, in 1888 and is buried at Fort Yates, south of her longtime home on Porcupine Creek.
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Forgotten Fur Trader: Joseph Graveline and Exploration on the Upper Missouri River
W. Raymond Wood examines the life of a little-known French-Canadian trader and interpreter. Graveline first came to historians’ attention through the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whom he assisted during their travels through Louisiana Territory in 1804–1806. Wood focuses on Graveline’s interactions with traders, explorers, government officials and American Indians before and after the Lewis and Clark Expedition to provide a fuller picture of the fur trader and his impact on the region. Wood is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri, where he taught for almost four decades. Articles in South Dakota History , the quarterly journal of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, are free to researchers and readers online once they are over ten years old, prior to that the issue can be purchased for $10.00, plus shipping and handling. Contact (605) 773-6009 for additional information.
Read the PDF of Forgotten Fur Trader: Joseph Graveline and Exploration on the Upper Missouri River Free
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Reexamining Dick Wilson: Oglala Politics, Nation Building and Local Conflict, 1972-1976
An exploration of the complicated legacy of Dick Wilson, who served as chair of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in the 1970s. While Wilson is most remembered for his controversial leadership during the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973, Truden emphasizes the chairman’s efforts to improve conditions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Wilson promoted education, worked to improve infrastructure and used federal funds with the goal of creating an independent Oglala nation. Truden is a doctoral student in history at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Articles in South Dakota History , the quarterly journal of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, are free to researchers and readers online once they are over ten years old, prior to that the issue can be purchased for $10.00, plus shipping and handling. Contact (605) 773-6009 for additional information.