[8] It was named for Belgian Father Pierre De Smet,[4][9] a 19th-century Jesuit missionary who worked with Native Americans in the United States and its territories for most of his life.

In the mid-1880s, prairie fires and failures of crops after a three-year period of drought caused many settlers to relocate their farms and homesteads to easier areas.

[10] By 1917, De Smet was a cow town, with many trains passing through every day carrying cattle to market.

[11] The Charles Ingalls family, originally of Wisconsin, arrived in De Smet in 1879.

Their travels and pioneer life in Minnesota, Kansas, Dakota Territory, and Iowa would be later chronicled in the Little House series of books written by the Ingallses' second oldest daughter, Laura Elizabeth - later known as Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There the Wilders lived just outside of De Smet on farmland, as well as Royal's feed store in town.

Ingalls and his wife, along with oldest daughter Mary, were among the church's eight original charter members.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.16 square miles (3.00 km2), all land.

[citation needed] Artist-illustrator Harvey Dunn was born in 1884 approximately eight miles from De Smet near Manchester, and painted scenes of frontier life in his later years.

[citation needed] Harry George Armstrong, a major general in the United States Air Force, a physician, and an airman, was born in De Smet in 1899.