Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/118

This page has been validated.
112
SOUTH DAKOTA

came with which these heroic boomers had not reckoned and which was destined to bring all their plans to naught. The new Republican party was rising into power. Abraham Lincoln had won national fame and in the spring of 1861 was to become President of the United States. The influence of the Dakota Land Company in Congress was gone. Every condition upon which they had so surely, and with good reason, counted for the success of their enterprise was changed, and when Dakota territory was finally organized, the management of its affairs fell into entirely different hands, the capital was located at Yankton, the public printing and the Indian contracts were controlled by Republicans, and all the rosy-tinted dreams of wealth and power which had inspired the Dakota Land Company vanished into thin air. The settlement at Sioux Falls dwindled away and finally, as we shall learn, was wholly abandoned.