SIOUX CITY

city, seat (1853) of Woodbury county, northwestern Iowa, U.S. It lies on the Missouri River (bridged to South Sioux City, Neb.) at the influx of the Big Sioux and the Floyd rivers, where Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska meet. The site was visited in 1804 by the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who buried Sergeant Charles Floyd there (commemorated by a monument erected in 1960, the first U.S. national historic landmark). Laid out in 1848 by William Thompson of Illinois and known as Thompsonville, it was settled by Theophile Bruguier, a French-Canadian trader, who arrived in 1849 with his Sioux Indian wives and their father, Chief War Eagle, who aided the European pioneers in the area. War Eagle's grave is in a park on a bluff overlooking the river with a view of the three states. Incorporated in 1857, the community was renamed for the chief's tribe. It grew with the steamboat trade and became a supply and land-office depot for the northern plains. With the advent of the railroad (1868) and the meat-packing industry (1872), its population increased rapidly from about 1,000 to 19,060 in 1885, reaching more than 70,000 by 1920. Transportation, stockyard activity, and extensive wholesale trade and grain interests are the chief economic activities. Sioux City is the seat of Morningside College (founded in 1889 as the University of the Northwest), Briar Cliff College (1930), and Western Iowa Tech Community College (1966). Pop. (1990) city, 80,505; Sioux City MSA, 115,018.