Yankton, South Dakota Yankton, South Dakota Yankton is a city in, and the county seat of, Yankton County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 14,454 at the 2010 census. Yankton is the principal city of the Yankton Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes the entirety of Yankton County, and which had an estimated population of 22,662 as of July 1, 2017. Yankton was the first capital of Dakota Territory. It is named for the Yankton tribe of Nakota (Sioux) Native Americans; Yankton is derived from the Nakota word "I-hank-ton-wan" ("the end village"). Yankton is located on the Missouri River just downstream of the
Native American cultures in the United States a slavery system similar to that of the American colonists, buying African American slaves, especially the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek. Though less than 3% of Native Americans owned slaves, divisions grew among the Native Americans over slavery. Among the Cherokee, records show that slave holders in the tribe were largely the children of European men that had shown their children the economics of slavery. As European colonists took slaves into frontier areas, there were more opportunities for relationships between African and Native American peoples. Among the Five Civilized Tribes, mixed-race slaveholders were generally part of an elite hierarchy, often based