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A Riverboat Town

By: Steven Rinella

Upon arriving in Yankton it’s best to pretend that you came in by riverboat on the Missouri River, America’s longest and most influential waterway. That way, you can experience Yankton as it was meant to be: It was once one of the Dakota Territory’s most important shipping and supply centers, and the riverfront today is as vital culturally as it was economically in the old days.
Yankton, named after the Yankton Sioux, came pretty close to being a household word, as the town narrowly missed development as the state capital in the 1860s. The city of Pierre, South Dakota, took that honor, but as a consolation prize Yankton was handed the territory’s insane asylum, which began Yankton’s unofficial designation as the health care center of South Dakota. Before that, the territory’s mentally ill were shipped off to hospitals in Nebraska and Minnesota.
Now, Yankton has more health care workers per capita than any city in South Dakota. This can be taken as an indicator of two things: The first is that the job market is strong; second, that the city is a favored retirement area for South Dakota’s seniors. Suburban retirement-styled housing along nearby Lewis and Clark Lake adds about 2,000 souls to the other 21,000 living within city limits. Along with adequate health care, Yankton offers an assortment of nine golf courses, inarguably the most important ingredient next to health care for a happy retirement.
To be fair, one can’t categorize Yankton as just an ideal retirement community because the job market is primed and ready for people who have a few more decades of work ahead of them. Yankton’s economy is growing well, with population, per capita income, and taxable sales rising steadily. The job markets primary employers include the Catholic Benedictine Mount Marty College, service industries, and a low-security U.S. federal prison. Manufacturing firms are plentiful, and Yankton cranks out goods ranging from oil filters to horse trailers and airplane parts to aluminum extrusions.
The downtown area along the river doesn’t give much away in terms of an industrial presence, but it is revealing of Yankton’s rich waterfront history. This is especially true during Yankton’s Riverboat days. The August celebration offers a comprehensive education in all things riverboat. While you check out the festivities you can also visit the site and corner posts of an old fort that was built by Yanktonians as a knee jerk response to the Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862. The fort was never attacked, but it stands as a reminder of the tensions with Native Americans that Yankton both inspired and suffered.
Other tensions were resolved in Yankton. In 1877, just months after word spread down the Missouri of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, Jack McCall was hung for the murder of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. McCall’s last words, when the noose was placed around his neck, were “Draw it tighter, Marshal.” He was buried to the north of town.
McCall’s place in Yankton history is well remembered, but not nearly so well as that of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Besides the large lake nearby, there are several other entities bearing signs of the explorers. The Lewis and Clark Theatre Company is the community’s live performing house. And the Corps of Discovery Welcome Center is there to help and guide visitors who are interested in the local sights and sounds. For history buffs who double as shopaholics, Yankton has a historic downtown shopping district that is surrounded by old Victorian era homes, some of them virtually unchanged since construction. The Cramer Kenyon Heritage Home is one such place that is open to public visitation. There are also several art galleries, one of special note being the Bede Art Gallery.
As far as vittles go, Yankton is a steak and seafood kind of town. South Dakota is beef country, and that culinary flag is waved high in Yankton. There’s also a great variety of fast food, some of it served in original, locally-owned joints that allow the diner to sample the local color and do it in a hurry. But if you do dine on fast food, please remember that you’re pretending to be in Yankton on a river boat trip. So, as quick as possible, get yourself back down to the waterfront. If Lewis and Clark were there today, that’s definitely where they’d be hanging out.