This week in Sioux City
- 7th Annual Siouxland Inspirational and Historical Short Film Festival
Sun, Nov 8 · 2 PM · Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center
About Sioux City
Sioux City grew up where the Big Sioux and Floyd rivers meet the Missouri, and its oldest story is a sad one: in August 1804 Sergeant Charles Floyd fell ill and died here, the only man the Lewis and Clark expedition lost, and his companions buried him on a bluff they named for him. Nearly a century later the town raised a 100-foot stone obelisk over his grave, and in 1960 it became the very first National Historic Landmark in the country. Steamboats from St. Louis brought the first ready-made houses up the river in 1856, and after James Booge opened a big packing plant in 1873 the stockyards followed, turning a river landing into a booming meatpacking city of tens of thousands within a few years. That prosperity left landmarks you can still visit: the Prairie School courthouse with its tall brick tower, and the 1927 Orpheum, a vaudeville and movie palace that went dark in 1992 and reopened, restored, in 2001 as home of the Sioux City Symphony. Today it is Iowa's fourth-largest city, a three-state hub where neighbors from Nebraska and South Dakota cross the river for shows, the riverfront park and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.