Great Sioux Reservation - General Allotment Act

General Allotment Act

In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, also called the Dawes Act to break up communal Indian lands into individual family holdings. On 2 March 1889, Congress passed another act (just months before North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the Union on 2 November 1889), which partitioned the Great Sioux Reservation, creating five smaller reservations:

• the Standing Rock Reservation (which included land in modern North Dakota which had not been part of the Great Sioux Reservation), with its agency at Fort Yates;
• the Cheyenne River Reservation, with its agency on the Missouri near the mouth of the Cheyenne River (later moved to Eagle Butte following the construction of Oahe Reservoir);
• the Lower Brule Reservation, with its agency near Fort Thompson;
• the Upper Brule or Rosebud Indian Reservation, with its agency near Mission; and
• the Pine Ridge Reservation (Oglala Sioux), with its agency at Pine Ridge near the Nebraska Border.

(Neither the Crow Creek Reservation, east of the Missouri River in central South Dakota, nor the Fort Berthold Reservation, which straddles the Missouri River in western North Dakota, were part of the original Great Sioux Reservation, although many historians assume one or both were.) With the boundaries of these five reservations established, approximately 9 million acres (36,000 km²), one-half of the former Great Sioux Reservation, was opened by the US government for public purchase for ranching and homesteading. Much of the area was not homesteaded until the 1910s, after the Enlarged Homestead Act increased allocations to 320 acres (1.3 km2) for "semi-arid land".

Settlement was encouraged by the railroads, and the US government issued publications of scientific instruction (since found to be incorrect) on how to farm the land. New European immigrants came to the area. The Lakota tribes received $1.25 per acre, usually used to offset agency expenses in meeting federal treaty obligations to the tribes.