Rosebud Indian Reservation - Geography and Population

Geography and Population

The RIR is located in south central South Dakota, and presently includes within its recognized border all of Todd County, an unincorporated county of South Dakota. However, the Oyate also has communities and extensive lands and populations in the four adjacent counties, which were once within the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (RST) boundaries: Tripp, Lyman, Mellette, and Gregory Counties, all in South Dakota. Mellette County, especially, has extensive off-reservation trust land, comprising 33.35 percent of its land area, where 40.23 percent of the population lives.

The total land area of the reservation and its trust lands is 1,970.362 sq mi (5,103.214 km²) with a population of 10,469 in the 2000 census. The main reservation (Todd County) has a land area of 1,388.124 sq mi (3,595.225 km²) and a population of 9,050. The RIR is bounded on the south by Cherry County, Nebraska, on the west by the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, on the north by the White River, and originally, on the east by the Missouri River.

The Oyate capital is the unincorporated town of Rosebud, established when the Spotted Tail Indian Agency (named after the 19th-century war chief, whose Lakota name was Sinte Gleska) was moved from northwestern Nebraska to the banks of Rosebud Creek near its confluence with the Little White River. The largest town on the reservation is Mission, located at the intersections of US Highways 18 and 83. Mission's near neighbor of Antelope is one of the many tribal band communities established in the late 1870s and growing since then. Other major towns in the reservation are Saint Francis, located southwest of Rosebud and the home of Saint Francis Indian School, a private Catholic institution first established as a mission school. Saint Francis, with a current population of about 2000, is the largest incorporated town in South Dakota without a state highway for access.

Located on the Great Plains, just north of the Nebraska Sandhills, Rosebud Indian Reservation has large areas of Ponderosa Pine forest scattered in its grasslands. Deep valleys are defined by steep hills and ravines, often with lakes dotting the deeper valleys.