City of Hustle, page 3
4 Gary D. Olson, “A Dakota Boomtown: Sioux Falls, 1877–1880,” Great Plains Quarterly vol. 24, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 19.
5 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 20.
6 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 20.
7 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 20–21.
8 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 21.
9 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 18; Timothy R. Mahoney, “The Small City in American History,” Indiana Magazine of History
vol. 99, no. 4 (December 2003), 317, 320.
10 Richard C. Wade, “Urban Life in Western America, 1790–1830,” American Historical Review vol. 64, no. 1 (October 1958), 20–21.
11 Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review vol. 27, no. 1 (June 1940), 52.
12 Schlesinger, “City in American History,” 52.
13 Schlesinger, “City in American History,” 58. On western cities borrowing technological advances from older eastern cities, see Lawrence H. Larsen, The Urban West at the End of the Frontier (Lawrence: Regent’s Press of Kansas, 1978).
14 James Connolly, “Bringing the City Back In: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era vol. 1, no. 3 (July 2002), 259; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “On the Importance of Place, or, a Plea for Idiosyncrasy,” Journal of Urban History vol. 24, no. 1 (November 1997), 79–87; James J. Connolly and E. Bruce Geelhoed, “The Small-City Experience in the Midwest: An Introduction,” Indiana Magazine of History vol. 99, no. 4 (December 2003), 308.
15 John C. Hudson, “Who Was ‘Forest Man?’ Sources of Migration to the Plains,” Great Plains Quarterly vol. 6, no. 2 (Spring 1986), 73–74.
16 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 26.
17 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 26.
18 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 27.
19 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 22.
20 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 17. On the settlement of this area, see Jon K. Lauck, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory 1879–1889 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).
21 William Silag, “Gateway to the Grasslands: Sioux City and the Missouri River Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly vol. 14, no. 4 (October 1983), 397. See also William E. Lass, A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri River (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962).
22 Silag, “Gateway to the Grasslands,” 399.
23 Silag, “Gateway to the Grasslands,” 408–9.
24 Silag, “Gateway to the Grasslands,” 410.
25 Silag, “Gateway to the Grasslands,” 406; Howard P. Chudacoff, “Where Rolls Down the Dark Missouri,” Nebraska History vol. 52 (1971), 2.
26 On Mrs. Will H. Booth’s work to bring opera to Sioux Falls, see “Sioux Falls Is Smallest City in U.S. to Boast of a Real Grand Opera Season,” Aberdeen Daily News, November 6, 1921. Mrs. Booth, who was married to a local jeweler, had for five seasons “arranged and promoted a series of concerts and recitals which have, because of the world-wide fame of the artists presented, given Sioux Falls a prominence in the musical world seldom attained by cities of many times its population.”
27 David Hein, “Churches on the Prairie II: Calvary Cathedral, Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” Anglican and Episcopal History vol. 59, no. 4 (December 1990), 545–46.
28 Hein, “Churches on the Prairie II,” 546.
29 Hein, “Churches on the Prairie II,” 547.
30 Connolly, “Bringing the City Back In,” 268–69.
31 Tom Dempster and Gary Olson, North of Twelfth Street: The Changing Face of Sioux Falls Neighborhoods (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2012).
32 Bruce A. Odenbach, “A History of First Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls, South Dakota” (MA Thesis, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1970), 6–7; H. A. Ustrud, “Little of Everything,” in Iver I. Oien, H. A. Hustrud, M. G. Opsahl, and J. O. Asen, eds., Norwegian Pioneers History of Minnehaha County, South Dakota from 1866 to 1896 (Sioux Falls, SD: Historical Organization’s Publication, 1928), 37–38.
33 Donald Dean Parker, History of Our County and State (privately printed, 1959), 27–29.
34 Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 23.
35 C. John Egan, Jr., Drop Him Till He Dies: The Twisted Tragedy of Homesteader Thomas Egan (Sioux Falls: Ex Machina Publishing Company, 1994).
36 Al Larson, “Minnehaha County Temples of Justice: The County Courthouses of Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” Material Culture vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 23–28.
37 Larson, “Minnehaha County Temples of Justice,” 25. See also Jennifer Dumke, W. L. Dow: The Architect Who Shaped Sioux Falls (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: The History Press, 2013).
38 Larson, “Minnehaha County Temples of Justice,” 23.
39 Larson, “Minnehaha County Temples of Justice,” 25.
40 April White, The Divorce Colony (forthcoming, Hachette Books, 2022); Olson, “Dakota Boomtown,” 23.
41 Charles A. Smith, A Comprehensive History of Minnehaha County, South Dakota (Mitchell, SD: Educator Supply Company, 1949), 160; Dana R. Bailey, History of Minnehaha County, South Dakota (Sioux Falls, SD: Brown & Saenger, 1899), 409; Chuck Vollan, Bone Dry: South Dakota’s Failed Experiment with Alcohol Prohibition (forthcoming).
42 Jon K. Lauck, “‘You Can’t Mix Wheat and Potatoes in the Same Bin’: Anti-Catholicism in Early Dakota,” South Dakota History vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 1–46.
43 Marshall Damgaard, The South Dakota State Capital: The First Century (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2008).
44 Ardyce Samp, The Dillinger Robbery of the Security National Bank & Trust Company of Sioux Falls (Sioux Falls, SD: Rushmore House Publishing, 1992).
45 Dorene Weinstein, “Power House Blast Was a Robbery Gone Awry,” Argus Leader, May 31, 2014.
46 John E. Miller, “Restrained, Respectable Radicals: The South Dakota Farm Holiday,” Agricultural History vol. 59, no. 3 (July 1985), 429–47; Lynwood E. Oyos, “Labor’s House Divided: The Morrell Strike of 1935–1937,” South Dakota History vol. 18, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1988), 67–88.
47 H. A. Ustrud, “Little of Everything,” in Iver I. Oien, H. A. Hustrud, M. G. Opsahl, and J. O. Asen, eds., Norwegian Pioneers History of Minnehaha County, South Dakota from 1866 to 1896 (Sioux Falls, SD: Historical Organization’s Publication, 1928), 28; Parker, History of Our County and State, 73.
48 Lynwood E. Oyos, Reveille for Sioux Falls: A World War II Army Air Forces Technical School Changes a South Dakota City (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 2014).
49 Some locals replicated Chicago’s famed Pump Room during the 1950s. See essay by Patrick Lalley in this volume.
50 Alan Ehrenhalt, “Saving Downtown: Face-to-Face Markets,” Current vol. 419 (January 2000), 14.
51 Larson, “Minnehaha County Temples of Justice,” 26.
52 See http://www.ajfroggie.com/roads/yellowbook/.
53 Loren Carlson, “The Republican Majority: Francis Higbee Case and Karl E. Mundt,” in Herbert T. Hoover and Larry Zimmerman, eds., South Dakota Leaders: From Pierre Chouteau, Jr. to Oscar Howe (Vermillion, SD: University of South Dakota Press, 1989), 302; “Road Proposal Submitted by Case Submitted,” Argus Leader, February 11, 1955.
54 Carlson, “Republican Majority,” 302.
55 “Sioux Falls-Fargo Link Is Added to Interstate System,” Capital Journal, October 18, 1957.
56 Harry McPherson, A Political Education: A Washington Memoir (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995), 71. Thanks to Owen Shay for sharing his work on this story. Shay, “South Dakota, Super-Highways, and Senator Francis Case” (Honors Thesis, South Dakota State University, May 7, 2014).
57 Antonino Vaccaro and Pico Di Trapani, Addiopizzo: Levering Consumers Responsible Purchase to Fight Mafia (New York: McGraw Hill, 2016).
58 Raymond A. Mohl, “Race and Housing in the Postwar City: An Explosive History,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 94, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 17–19.
59 Zane L. Miller, “Pluralism, Chicago School Style: Louis Wirth, the Ghetto, the City, and ‘Integration,” Journal of Urban History vol. 18, no. 3 (May 1992), 253–54.
60 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology vol. 44, no. 1 (July 1938), 12, 22.
61 Adrian Larson, “The Birds of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Vicinity,” Wilson Quarterly vol. 37, no. 1 (March 1925), 18–38.
62 Marcia Brinkman, “Sioux Falls: Steady as She Grows,” Corporate Report (April 1976), 41.
63 On Sioux City’s demise, see Ralph Brown, “A Tale of Two Cities: Sioux Falls and Sioux City,” South Dakota Business Review vol. 58, no. 2 (December 2004), 1–19.
64 Marguerite T. Smith and Debra Wishik Englander, “The Best Places to Live in America,” Money vol. 21, no. 9 (September 1992).
65 “What’s Up in America’s Best Place to Live,” Money vol. 21, no. 11 (November 1992).
66 Todd Wilkinson, “Sioux Falls: A City of the ‘90s with Leave-It-to-Beaver Values,” Christian Science Monitor vol. 89, no. 4 (November 29, 1996).
67 Wilkinson, “Sioux Falls.”
68 Wilkinson, “Sioux Falls.”
69 Alan Ehrenhalt, “Saving Downtown: Face-to-Face Markets,” Current vol. 419 (January 2000), 14.
70 See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
71 Jeff Martin, “Sioux Falls Builds on Its Rich Past,” USA Today, December 26, 2008.
72 Brinkman, “Sioux Falls,” 27.
73 Robert E. Wright, “Wall Street on the Prairie: Citibank, South Dakota and the Origins of Financial Deregulation,” Financial History (Spring 2013), 24–26.
74 Brinkman, “Sioux Falls,” 41. Murders per 100,000 people: Detroit, 40; Cleveland, 28; Memphis, 28; Philadelphia, 20; Sioux Falls, 2.7. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports statistics from 2017 for the top 100 most populous cities in America that have reported data to the FBI UCR system.
75 “America’s Happiest Cities,” Men’s Health vol. 35, no. 10 (December 2020).
76 Wilkinson, “Sioux Falls”; John Stossel, “Sioux Falls Beats San Francisco in Charity,” Human Events vol. 62, no. 42 (December 11, 2006).
City of Hustle
Larry Fuller, Evan Nolte, and Mike Cooper
Sioux Falls today would seem to be in the sweet spot for a regional midwestern city—with a metro population of more than 265,000, it’s a retail, financial, agricultural, health care, transportation, and entertainment hub. The next largest cities are Denver to the west, Minneapolis-St. Paul to the east, and Omaha to the south.
Sioux Falls has received numerous national acclaims for its quality of life and strong business climate. The state has no corporate or personal income tax, either.
But the truth is that Sioux Falls has never had it easy, all the way back to its founding in the mid-1860s. Unlike its neighbors in Sioux City, Iowa, and Fargo, North Dakota, Sioux Falls didn’t have a real reason for existing, much less succeeding. It was never on a navigable river, not part of a major national rail system, nor was it on any substantial trade route. Other than one meatpacking plant, there were no major industries.
The DNA of Sioux Falls is that it’s a city built on hustle. From its very early days, most of the businesses were locally owned. Entrepreneurs made things like beer, flour, biscuits, brooms, candy, and cigars, and there was a thriving retail environment plus a strong agricultural market.
Emblematic of early business leaders was Richard F. Pettigrew, a lawyer, surveyor, land developer, and politician in the late 1880s who dabbled in everything from a meatpacking plant to railroads to the city’s streetcar line. But his most memorable venture was the Queen Bee Mill, a massive seven-story flour mill that could process 1,200 barrels of wheat a day. The problem was that the area wasn’t capable of providing that much wheat, and the adjacent Big Sioux River was not a reliable source of power. It closed after two years.
The city’s biggest economic break in its earlier years was the opening of the John Morrell & Company packing plant on the city’s northern edge. It was huge—and still is. Located next to the Sioux Falls Stockyards, in 1911, it was processing thousands of hogs, cattle, and sheep daily.
By 1910, with a population of 10,000, Sioux Falls was getting its footing toward uninterrupted double-digit population growth every decade, which landed it at more than 80,000 people by 1980. Sioux Falls always was considerably smaller than its sister city, Sioux City, about ninety miles south, but the gap was almost closed in 1980.
Sioux Falls entered the 1970s strong, particularly as a retail center. Like most midwestern cities, Sioux Falls tried urban renewal to save its city center. And like other cities, urban renewal programs were costly (mostly underwritten by the federal government) but largely unsuccessful.
But Sioux Falls, unlike a lot of those towns, notably Sioux City and Aberdeen, never tried to block malls outside downtown. That independent, entrepreneurial view also has been part of the city’s DNA.
As a result, in 1968, the first enclosed retail shopping mall in South Dakota, the Western Mall, opened at Forty-First Street and Western Avenue. That was followed in 1975 with the Empire Mall, a regional retail center with more than a million square feet, created by the General Growth Corporation further west on Forty-First Street. This major development was joined by the Empire East expansion in 1978. Forty-First Street in Sioux Falls had become the new “Main Street of South Dakota.”
Sioux Falls stumbled a bit in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s in both economic development and community involvement.
In the mid-1970s, a recession emerged, driven by skyrocketing oil prices and huge increases in spending by the federal government for the war in Vietnam. By 1980, the Midwest, including South Dakota, was hit by a major agricultural recession that especially affected livestock producers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses of all sizes.
There also was concern that Sioux Falls might be losing its niche as the major retail center in the region. Many South Dakota towns with a population of more than 10,000 had a small JCPenney and a Kmart. Why drive to Sioux Falls when some of the same stores were just next door?
But that old hustle emerged again as the city tried to figure out how to move ahead. It wasn’t easy. The city’s DNA was still there, though, and Sioux Falls eventually emerged as a regional and even national pacesetter.
One of the earlier harbingers of change was in the surprising 1974 city commission election, when a young radio personality, Rick Knobe, was elected mayor, defeating Mike Schirmer, who was supported by most of the business and professional community. Knobe won people over with his ability to listen and take suggestions for improving the city.
This headline from a 1988 issue of Governing magazine captures what happened: “How a Shaggy-Haired Deejay Took Over City Hall and Ended Elitist Politics.” Knobe was easily reelected in 1979 to a second five-year term, this time supported by a broad range of leaders and residents.
As the turn of the decade approached, there was a malaise in parts of the community, including the business community. There wasn’t much progress in attracting new business or industry. In 1978, the Sioux Falls Development Foundation was testing reactions to a business actually interested in Sioux Falls: a tire recycling plant. That never happened.
One of the problems was that there wasn’t any factual basis for making decisions, including what to do about a widely held belief that people in the region didn’t like Sioux Falls very much.
In 1981, the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce conducted an unprecedented regional research project with Campbell Research of Minneapolis, documenting reasons area residents visited the city. The results showed that Sioux Falls had a surprisingly strong and positive image with area residents for retail and medical services and entertainment options.
On the basis of this research, a marketing and promotional campaign, “Sioux Falls—A Good Thing Going,” was developed by a task force of volunteer media, businesses, and professionals working with the chamber staff.
This campaign had a positive impact in helping solidify Sioux Falls as a great place to shop, get healthy, and be entertained. It also helped boost community confidence and pride at a challenging time. The campaign was made possible by financial support from individual businesses and in-kind media contributions totaling approximately $80,000, which was very significant for that time.
