With the eastern border on the 98th meridian, Aurora County sits in the transition area between the tall grass prairies of the Midwest and the short grass prairies of the Great Plains. This is where waving fields of grain give way to roaming herds of cattle, where abundant showers and soothing breezes convert to scarce rains and hot winds, where the American Midwest shifts to the American West. While the county today is on the western edge of the American Midwest, at one time this area was at the western frontier of American expansion.
Before 1880, buffalo, antelope, coyote, and prairie dogs roamed freely on the unbroken prairie that became Aurora County. Grasses grew in rich soil atop ancient lakebeds covered by prehistoric rocks and the fill of glaciers from an earlier age. Small creeks and lakes created a welcome habitat for fur-covered mammals, several types of waterfowl, and an abundance of fish. A thousand years earlier, Firesteel Creek, in the northwestern corner of the county, likely was the site of a small Indian village whose people cultivated corn until they moved farther north, after having depleted all of the wood found along the creek.
Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to claim ownership of this land as part of a much larger territory, followed by a French fur trader who secured the region for France in 1730. After losing the territory to Spain, France recovered ownership in 1800 and soon sold the region to President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. Later that same year, the Lewis and Clark expedition set out to explore the new acquisition, the Louisiana Territory.
The first adventurer to record traveling in the area that became Aurora County was George Catlin, an explorer journeying by land from Yankton to Fort Pierre in June 1832. Dakota Territory, which included today’s North and South Dakota, as well as parts of Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming, was created in 1862 but was reduced to most of today’s North and South Dakota in 1863, until both became states in 1889.
By 1880, both the buffalo and the Indians were gone from Aurora County. The Indians who had camped and hunted here most likely belonged to the Yankton tribes, specifically the Nakota Sioux. Under the terms of the Yankton Treaty of 1858, the Yankton people ceded a little more than eleven million acres east of the Missouri River to the United States government. That land was then placed in the public domain.
Along the Missouri River near Yankton, 400,000 acres were reserved as reservation land for 2,200 tribal members. In 1866, two other reservations were established near the river, Crow Creek, about forty miles northwest of the county and Lower Brule, about fifty miles to the west. In addition, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 set aside sixty million acres for the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River. The establishment of tribal reservations effectively removed any Indians from Aurora County.
European-Americans, eager to expand westward, then looked to Dakota Territory as the newest opportunity for cheap land and easy riches. Railroad companies, anticipating big profits, launched numerous expansion programs. By 1878, with the Indians removed, government land offices opening, and the railroads laying new tracks, the area was perfectly primed for a boom.
Formally established in 1879, Aurora County was organized in 1881, and the current borders were set in 1883. The only county in Dakota Territory named for a woman and by women, Aurora County was named for Aurora, the goddess of the dawn in Roman mythology, signifying the hopes and dreams of the women and men poised at the dawn of a new age.
_____
It Happened Right Here: On the Western Front, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, February 25, 2016.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 