Fort Randall Reservoir Archeology, Geology, History

The Missouri River drainage, a geographic unit, lies entirely within the boundaries of the area known to history as the Louisiana Purchase. This real estate transaction, completed in 1803 — one of the most famous land sales in the history of the world — comprised an area first claimed in 1682 by the explorer LaSalle as "Louisiane", on behalf of his king, Louis XIV of France.

Actual investigation of this vast and ill-defined region, however, was necessarily long delayed. Not until the remarkable expedition of Lewis and Clark, lasting from 1804 to 1806, could the true exploration of the entire area, then known as Louisiana, be considered as having been well started, and many decades were to elapse before it could be considered completely explored.

The chief topographic feature of the region was, of course, the Missouri River itself. Not long after its original discovery by Jolliet and Father Marquette in 1673, French colonials began to explore its turbulent, treacherous waters. By the 1750's, fur-trading posts had been attempted by the adventurer Bourgmont in central Missouri and near the site of the later Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. From such distant bases, explorations of the Kansas River and farther up the main valley soon began to provide some knowledge of the geography of the vast region, at least as far along the Missouri River as present South Dakota. By this time other French colonials from the lower St. Lawrence River were exploring westward from the Great Lakes, and had briefly touched the North Dakota parts of the great valley.

But France's grip on her New World empire was loosening, and after 1763, and the fall of Canada to the British crown, her former colonial settlers in Louisiana (now suddenly subjects of the King of Spain) had neither means nor incentive to continue such daring explorations as those of LaSalle, Bourgmont, or the la Verendrye family. Their attention was concentrated instead on the trade with the Indians. From tiny settlements such as St. Louis they occasionally ventured far, often in parties of but one or two persons, braving the river in small dugout canoes (or pirogues), with goods for trading with the Indians and, if fortunate, returning laden with furs and hides.

One such small merchant-adventurer in the upper Missouri River country was Jean-Baptiste Truteau, a former schoolmaster, who traded with the Ponca Indians near the Niobrara River. His "Ponca House", located a few miles below the site of Fort Randall Dam and used during the winter of 1794-95, was probably the first actual White residence in what, less than a century later, was to become the State of South Dakota.

Another trader of this last period before Lewis and Clark was Regis Loisel, who, about 1800, built a "Cedar Fort" just above the present Fort Randall Reservoir; with him was the witty Pierre-Antoine Tabeau, with whom Lewis and Clark consulted. Tabeau's reminiscences of trading in the present Dakotas are among the best surviving accounts of the geography, the wild life, and the native peoples of the region as they were in his time.

Such true frontiersmen as Truteau and Tabeau — and there were many others — penetrated the great valley of the Missouri by the river itself. The river, furthermore, long continued to be the chief route into the valley; for fifty years after Lewis and Clark's time it was still the avenue by which the wealth sought by the traders, in hides and furs, and the multifarious goods traded for them, were transported — first by simple watercraft, hauled, poled, or paddled up and down the stream, and finally by steamboats of special design for the purpose.