Dakota Life goes outside to Goat Island and other South Dakota sites Thursday, May 2, at 8pm (7 MT) on SDPB1. Of the Missouri River’s full 2,341 miles, today only 100 approximate the natural reaches experienced first by the Sioux, Pawnee and Ponca and later by French and Anglo expeditioners. In the 39and 59-mile stretches between Pickstown, SD, and Sioux City, IA, the riverscape shifts with braided channels, capricious sandbars, and ungovernable snags that delight and challenge kayakers and canoeists. Within the 59-Mile District of the Wild and Scenic River, between Yankton and Vermillion, lies Goat Island. Accessible only by watercraft, Goat Island is 3-miles long and a quarter-mile at its widest. The fine sand and loamy soil manifest expansive sandbars, sleepy backchannels, and a dense forest of old-growth cottonwoods with a profuse underbrush of red cedar, dogwood, sumac and wild grape. The island hosts deer, beaver, muskrat and turkey. Recent archaeological inventories indicate no long-term human habitation; found artifacts include a couple of old wagon wheels, fence posts and livestock wire, as well as more “non-historic” trash deposits, like beer cans and plastic water bottles. Goat Island derived its name from the goat herd grazed there in the 1940s and 50s by Vermillion lawyer and landowner Norman “Jake” Jaquith. Jaquith also owned nearby “Jake’s Landing,” a tree grove formerly known as “Elm City,” which supplied wood as a steamboat refueling stop. Near the upper end of Goat Island, on the Nebraska side, lies the ribs of the North Alabama steamboat, which sank after hitting a snag on October 27, 1870. In the 1970s and 80s, cows foraged the island, ferried over by Nebraska cattleman Glenn Foster, who built his hearty herd a makeshift barge out of 55-gallon drums, wood, and corrugated steel. In the early 1990s, an Omaha businessman posted 4
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