Culture
The culture of the Missouri River Valley predates European settlement by thousands of years. The first development of a unique European-driven culture dates to the 1850s when steamboats plied the river. The Missouri River Valley Culture, or "Steamboat Society," was first defined by non-Indian residents of the Dakotas who sold wood to steamboats or trapped furs along the river bottoms. Gambling, prostitution and illegal alcohol sales to American Indians fueled the growth of the culture, which eventually included outfitters, livestock ranchers and tribal agents. A line of urbanized centers grew along the river in response which bloomed when reservations were alloted throughout the region.
Uniting themselves along the banks of the river, South Dakotans identify themselves even today as "East River" or "West River". According to the University of South Dakota, the associated present-day culture of the Missouri River Valley contains a broad swath of political, social, historic, and artistic perspectives.
Read more about this topic: Missouri River Valley
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
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You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
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You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
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—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)