Railroads were crucial in the settlement of many parts of the American West. Much of South Dakota was homesteaded as the railroads came through. In many cases the railroad companies decided where townsites would be located, and they advertised heavily in the East and in Europe to persuade people to buy land along their routes. Sometimes railroad agents gathered people from particular ethnic groups and brought them west on special excursion trains to settle in "colonies." Farmers were often dependent on the railroads to take their crops to market, to bring equipment and manufactured household goods, and to deliver the mail. Later, as highways and then airlines took over much of the transportation business, the closing of railroads forced many people to relocate and brought the end of some small towns.

Railroads shaped the settlement of South Dakota in many ways. Many eastern South Dakota towns date their founding from the arrival of the railroads as they moved west from Minnesota to the Missouri River. The Black Hills area developed separately with rail connections south and west to Nebraska and Wyoming. Parts of the West River area remained reliant on stagecoaches and bull trains until the early 1900s when bridges finally crossed the Missouri River and connected the eastern and western rail lines.

Understanding railroad history can help answer questions of how and why ancestors settled and moved where they did. My ancestors moved to Kansas to work on the railroad, and then homesteaded on railroad land there. Railroad employment records are directly important for genealogists, but railroad history can fill in other parts of family histories as well.

The South Dakota State Archives contains many types of records concerning railroads and other forms of transportation in South Dakota. Records include books, maps, photographs, proceedings of the state Railroad Commission, Milwaukee Road deeds, and right-of-way files from railroad closings in the 1970s. The Department of Transportation periodically took photos of each railroad crossing to record road repairs, and these photos now show changes in small towns and rural areas that may not be documented elsewhere.

The following list includes some of the recent additions to the archives collections concerning railroad history in South Dakota:

Rick Mills, The Milwaukee Road in Dakota. Hermosa, S.Dak.: Battle Creek Publishing Company, 1998. Mills has written several books on Dakota railroads with extensive illustrations.

H. Roger Grant, The North Western: A History of the Chicago & North Western Railway System. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.

History of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway Co., and Representative Employes. Chicago: Railroad Historical Company, 1901. This volume includes 600 biographies.

North Western Lines. Quarterly published by the Chicago & North Western Historical Society. Includes regular articles about railroad archives.

Chicago & North Western Railroad, Huron Division Records, 1931-1981. 21 cubic feet. These records were salvaged from the Huron railroad station when it was torn down. The records do not include employment files, but do provide extensive information about the day-to-day operations of the Huron switching station.

Department of Transportation, Railroad Maps, ca. 1917-1962. 5 cubic feet. Detailed station and siding maps for every town and rail line in South Dakota.

SD State Archives,  605-773-3804, fax 605-773-6041; email archref@state.sd.us