PIERRE, the capital city of South Dakota, U.S.A., and the county seat of Hughes county; in the centre of the State, on the east bank of the Missouri river opposite the mouth of Bad river, at an altitude (at the State capitol) of 1,496 ft. It is on Federal highways 14 and 83; has a municipal airport ; and is served by the Chicago and North Western railway. Pop. 193o Federal census 3,659. Four miles north of the city is a monument marking the geographical centre of the State and the approximate Centre of North America. The State capitol (erected 1905-1o) is a beau tiful building 292 ft. long by 124 ft. wide and 161 ft. high to the top of the lantern. Near the capitol is an artificial lake, fed from an artesian well by water which never freezes, where swans, geese and wild ducks live the year round. The city owns more than a mile of river frontage, and its parks include a wooded island of i,000 acres. Artesian wells supply the city not only with water but also with natural gas of high heating content. Pierre is the seat of a government Indian school and of Northern college (Christian; established 1927). The State Historical Museum (in the capitol) has many interesting relics, including a leaden plate, buried in I 743 by La Verendrye on a hill across the river (within the present city of Fort Pierre) to claim the country for France, and discov ered by high school children in 1913. Pierre is an important ship ping point and centre of wholesale and jobbing interests. It has railroad shops, granite works and other manufacturing industries.
The first permanent settlement by white men in South Dakota was made in 1817 by Joseph La Framboise, a fur trader, just below the mouth of Bad river. He called his post Ft. Teton. In 1822 Ft. Tecumseh was built 2 m. up-stream; and in 1832, when its site was washed into the river, Ft. Pierre Chouteau was erected to take its place, a mile farther up-stream and a little back from the river. It was named after Pierre Chouteau, Jr. (1789-1865), who had in 1804 succeeded his father in the Missouri Fur Company, and for 20 years Ft. Pierre (as it soon came to be called) was the chief fur-trading depot of the Upper Missouri country. In 1855 the United States bought the building and other property of the post and laid out around them a military reservation of 27o sq.m. (abandoned in 1857) which was the headquarters of operations against the Sioux and the scene of a council with their chiefs. In the early days steamboats plied regularly on the Mis souri river as far as Ft. Benton (Montana) i,000 m. above Pierre. The first sermon in South Dakota was preached in 1840 by the Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, a missionary to the Dakota Indians, on a spot near the free wagon bridge across the Missouri which bears his name. The city was platted in 188o, incorporated as a village in 1883, and chartered as a city in 1900. One of the few surviving herds of buffalo in the United States is quartered in the river brakes 4 m. north of Fort Pierre.