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and Wahpakootas. These bands called themselves Dakota, meaning a confederacy.
When Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri Valley in 1804, the Yankton Sioux occupied the country along the upper Des Moines and Little Sioux valleys and about the group of lakes in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota. They had for many generations roamed over that region and eastern Dakota and had named the rivers and lakes. Their principal villages were along the shores of Okoboji and Spirit Lake. Their name for the latter was Minne-Mecoehe-Waukon, or “Lake of the Spirits.” Its name was derived from an old tradition among the Sioux that “a very long time ago there was an island in the lake; that the first Indians who sailed to it in their canoes, were seized and drowned by demons. No Indian again ventured near its shores, and it finally disappeared beneath the waters.”
The Little Sioux River was called by the Indians Ea-ne-ah-wad-e-pon, signifying stone river. It was so named from the fact that near its bank in the southern part of Cherokee County is an immense red granite bowlder projecting above the surface twenty feet, being about sixty feet long and forty feet wide. It is flat at the top with a basin near the middle. It was called by the early settlers in that region Pilot Rock. From its summit could be seen a vast expanse of beautiful undulating prairie, through which winds the Little Sioux River, fringed with a narrow belt of woods.
In 1805 Lieutenant Pike estimated the number of Sioux at more than twenty-one thousand. One of their most noted chiefs in the first half of the nineteenth century was Wa-ne-ta of the Yanktons. When but eighteen years old he distinguished himself in the War of 1812, fighting with his tribe for the British at the battle of Sandusky. He was instrumental in organizing a union of all of the Sioux tribes and became the chief of the confederacy of Sioux, often leading them in battle and victory against the
