Part 6
166 AYAKO UCHIDA
Riggs recorded the response of the farming Indians as follows: “In regard
to the treaty of last spring I doubt now if there will be any thing done by
them to prevent its ratification. Every one speaks against it but no one
acts.”36)
The traditionalist Indians were more critical of this land cession. They
showed their discontent through resistance and disturbance on the reservations.
They attacked short-haired Indians wearing clothes as “converts”
to white culture, and once again there were stormy protests
and persecution of Indians who demonstrated the least interest in
Christianity. Directly attacking the missionaries was not their policy
since they knew that it would incite drastic action by the federal government.
In this critical period, however, some Indians even resorted to
attacking the missionaries. On several occasions Riggs had been shot
from behind and he once received a slight wound on his hand.37) In the
eyes of these Indians, the missionaries came to be seen as hands of an
overall white dominance.
The traditionalists also developed a cultural “underground” to regenerate
the native lifeways and to retain independence. A secret organization
of the Indians called the “Soldiers’ Lodge” developed at both the
Redwood and Yellow Medicine Agencies in the 1850s. This lodge had
traditionally been a local committee to control the village hunt, but
increasingly it evolved into a quasi-military society of young hunters for
resisting acculturation and the reservation system. Unlike the more conventional
tribal council, its members were mainly hunters, and it refused
to admit farmers. In 1862, young hunters in the Mdewakanton Soldiers’
Lodge turned to the “talk of war” and eventually persuaded Little Crow
to lead an uprising.38) By this time the Dakota society was torn between
followers of white civilization and traditionalists who opposed it.
III THE DAKOTA WAR
The bloody summer of 1862, mentioned briefly at the beginning of
this essay, was the outburst of traditionalist Indian discontent which
steadily mounted during the 1850s. The direct cause was the mismanagement
of annuities by the federal government and its Indian Agent.
After the Civil War broke out in 1861, the payment and distribution of
annuities were delayed and caused a food shortage on the Sioux reservations
that had begun the previous year. By the summer of 1862, the
annuities were several months late in arriving at the agencies, and Indians
THE PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE 167
were starving and their patience was wearing thin. Frustration and anger
could be found throughout the reservations.
Even before 1862 the annuities promised by the treaties had never been
fully paid or handed out. Minnesota in the 1850s exemplified all the evils
and corruption of the federal system of Indian administration. By one
means or another, the money due to the Sioux always ended up in the
pockets of local American officials and traders and other non-Indian
claimants. Goods intended for allotment were sold at unfairly high prices
in stores, and desperate Indians purchased them on credit, thereby creating
yet another claim on the annuities by traders. The Office of Indian
Affairs failed to investigate these charges as well as problems concerning
illegal sales of liquor and mistreatment of Indian women by white
men. It also encouraged the unequal distribution of annuity money and
food only to Indians who showed some inclination to become farmers.
It was a summation of such injustice and failures to honor treaty obligations,
repeated year after year, that provoked the rebellion in 1862.39)
The bitter resentment of Indians finally erupted on August 17, 1862,
when four Indian hunters killed several white settlers near Acton in
Meeker County. Returning quickly to the Redwood Agency, they told
their story to Mdewakantons who had been resisting the attempt to make
them farmers. The Mdewakantons sympathized with those involved in
the attack and soon agreed to begin a war, seeking the support of Little
Crow, the most influential of the Mdewakantons. Little Crow first
opposed war and tried to dissuade the young men. He had been a negotiator
and signer of the Treaties of 1851 and 1858. He also had made a
trip to Washington, D.C. in 1854 to campaign for well-defined boundary
lines for the Dakota reservations and had known what the power
of whites was like. Nevertheless, when accused of cowardice in the
presence of approximately one hundred members of the Mdewakanton
Soldiers’ Lodge, he delivered a powerful speech and reluctantly agreed
to support a war:
Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing. You
are full of the white man’s devil-water (rum). You are like dogs in the Hot
Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little
herds that once covered the prairies [that] are no more. See!—the white men
are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snow-storm.
You may kill one- two- ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder,
and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one- two- ten, and ten times ten
will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with
168 AYAKO UCHIDA
guns in their hands will come faster than you count. . . . Braves, you are little
children—you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves
hunt them in the Hard Moon (January). Ta-o-ya-te-du-ta [Little Crow] is not
a coward; he will die with you.40)
Once the decision had been made to wage war, the soldiers planned
an assault on the Redwood Agency and attacked it in the morning of
August 18. Nearly two dozen people, most of whom were either traders
or government employees, were killed. Many Dakotas, especially Indian
farmers and mixed-bloods, as well as whites, were surprised by news of
the attack. Convinced of eminent danger, some of them fled with the
whites to Fort Ridgely and New Ulm.
After clearing the countryside of white settlers, the leaders of the
Mdewakanton Soldiers’ Lodge headed for the Yellow Medicine Agency
because they expected the army under Colonel Henry H. Sibley farther
down the Minnesota River to march north. Little Crow’s army reached
Yellow Medicine Agency, the territory of the Sissetons and Wahpetons,
on August 28. By the evening of August 18, rumors of the fighting
had reached the Sissetons and Wahpetons, and since the fighting promised
to involve Yellow Medicine, they started to debate it. When the
Mdewakanton war party arrived, they found opposition to warfare to be
growing among the Sisseton and Wahpeton leaders, and especially
among the Christian and farming Indians under the influence of the missionaries.
In the debates, the spokesmen for these “mission Indians” disagreed
with the course taken by the Mdewakantons and even tried to
prevent Little Crow and his people from campaigning on their lands. By
this time there were two distinct camps. Little Crow, Jerome Big Eagle
(Wamditanka), Robert Hakewaste (Good Fifth Son), White Spider
(Unktomiska, John C. Wakeman), George Quinn (Wakandayamani, The
Spirit That Rattles as It Walks), Lightning Blanket (Hachinwakanda,
David Wells), and Wowinape (Appearing One, Thomas Wakeman) participated
in the fighting and constituted the “war party,” while such fullbloods
as Paul Mazakutemani (He Who Shoots as He Walks, Little Paul),
Simon Anawangmani, Taopi (Wounded Man), Joseph Wabasha (Red
Standard), Akipa (Joseph Akipa Renville), and Lorenzo Lawrence as
well as several mixed-bloods as Samuel J. Brown, Thomas A. Robertson,
Gabriel Renville (Tiwakan, Sacred Lodge), and his son Victor Renville
opposed the war and formed a “peace party.”
Gabriel Renville, who was a nephew of Joseph Renville and lived six
miles north of the Yellow Medicine Agency, became the organizer of
THE PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE 169
the Soldiers’ Lodge for the peace party. As soon as the war began,
Renville secretly advised the missionaries to flee. It is significant that
Riggs, Williamson, and their families survived the massacre. Such members
of the Hazelwood Republic as Simon Anawangmani, John Otherday
(Ampatutokacha, Good Sounding Voice), Lorenzo Lawrence, and
Ecetukiya (He Who Brings What He Wants, Big Amos), a nephew of
Paul Mazakutemani, helped the missionaries and other whites to escape.
During the uprising Lorenzo Lawrence rescued ten captured white
women and children by taking them with his family from Yellow
Medicine to Fort Ridgely. John Otherday was another full-blood who
guided whites to safety. The arrival of refugees in St. Paul caused a great
stir that was covered by the newspapers.41)
Paul Mazakutemani, an early convert to Christianity and a member of
the Hazelwood Republic, became the leading spokesman for the peace
party. In the intertribal councils convened in late August and early
September Mazakutemani attempted to persuade the war party that:
The Americans are a great people. They have much lead, powder, guns, and
provisions. Stop fighting, and now gather up all the captives and give them
to me. No one who fights with the white people ever becomes rich, or remains
two days in one place, but is always fleeing and starving.42)
The war party and the peace party quarreled over the issues of war,
captives, and plunder. Heated debate especially broke out concerning the
fate of more than a hundred white captives in the hands of the war party.
At times it seemed as if warfare would break out within the Indian camps.
The peace party devised a strategy to negotiate with the whites and eventually
started to contact Sibley. It formed a conclave called Camp
Release and kept the captives there until Sibley’s troops came. The rise
of the peace party soon made it difficult for the Dakota warriors to sustain
their war effort. As it became increasingly obvious that the Dakota
could not win the war, the peace party rapidly attracted the support of
the Sisseton and the Wahpeton, as well as the farming Mdewakanton and
the mixed-bloods. The intertribal social and political discord intensified
as the unpopularity of the war spread among the Indians. This reflected
the wrenching divisiveness that had developed among the Dakota during
the decade before the war.
The struggle within the Dakota community climaxed in mid September
when more than a thousand Americans under the command of Sibley
marched up the Minnesota River and quelled the battle. By September
170 AYAKO UCHIDA
26 the fighting in Minnesota had ended and around a thousand Indians
were taken captive while the rest, including Little Crow, fled to Canada
and the northern plains. After turning the captives over to the whites at
Camp Release, most of the Christian Indians became scouts for Sibley
and served throughout his subsequent campaigns in the northern Great
Plains.
During October and November, nearly 400 full-bloods and mixedbloods
were tried by a military tribunal, and 303 were sentenced to death
by hanging. Nevertheless, Henry B. Whipple, the bishop of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in Minnesota, asked the federal government to consider
the bitter wrongs committed by whites against the Indians and influenced
President Abraham Lincoln to spare most of those who had been
convicted. After having the case examined, Lincoln commuted all but
38 of the sentences.43) Those who were not hanged were imprisoned at
Mankato, and two thousand of their family members were placed under
guard at Fort Snelling. Williamson worked among the imprisoned
Indians until he was forbidden to do so in 1863, when more than 300
prisoners were baptized. Although those imprisoned were released three
years later, the uprising cost the Sioux their reservations; after the massacre
about 1300 Dakotas were removed to the Crow Creek reservation,
a drought-stricken place, in Dakota Territory. The sons of missionaries
followed them to continue their work there.44) By the 1870s most of the
resistance by the Plains Indians would be suppressed, and they were relocated
on reservations.
CONCLUSION
Missionary work among the Dakota coincided with the mounting pressure
from white encroachment and the development of political and
social divisions within Dakota society. The initial contact and early missionization
were rather peaceful because the power relationship between
the Indians and the whites was not rigid. Some Indians, especially the
mixed-bloods, converted to Christianity and received an education.
Nevertheless, the missionaries found themselves the objects of escalating
suspicion and hostility because the increasing contacts revealed their
intolerance and bias toward the people. The Indians initiated a campaign
of open harassment and eventually thwarted the missionaries in the
1840s. Most Dakota tried to preserve their ancestral spirituality and practice
as a response to the pressure to civilize, so the very traditions and
THE PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE 171
culture which the missionaries condemned became a focal point of their
identity. It was during this phase that the Indian consciousness was awakened.
Nevertheless, the growing economic dependence on the part of the
Indians and their land cessions in the 1850s intensified the intervention
of whites in the lives of the Dakota. The mission on the reservation
became the spearhead of acculturation, and some Indians tried to adopt
the white way of life. While the Indian Christians tried to create a “middle
ground” in order to negotiate with and accommodate the whites, the
alienated traditionalists showed their resistance and developed an
“underground” culture in the Soldiers’ Lodge. The Dakota no longer
acted in unison but were torn apart over their relations with whites, which
accelerated their social disintegration. After a series of injustices and
mismanagement of the reservations by whites the traditionalists finally
resorted to war in 1862. This war revealed the undercurrent divisions in
Dakota society, and the reluctance of Sisseton and Wahpeton leaders
under the influence of the mission to join Little Crow’s war party thwarted
attempts at intertribal unity. In order to take a more rational policy
of negotiation and accommodation, Christianized Indians and mixedbloods
tried to discourage the war proceedings of the traditionalists.
Although the peace party helped to bring about an early end to the war,
the compromise with whites ultimately sacrificed their own people and
their last foothold in Minnesota, the ancestral homeland.
In this process the missionaries were rather ineffective as cultural
mediators, because, despite devoting their lives to the Indians and even
earning the respect of some Christian Indians, they neither reflected upon
their assimilationist views nor comprehended the tenacity of native
belief. Although government and missionary interests were not always
identical, the mission became the locus of cultural and political conflicts
providing the silent battleground. The divided response and ultimate
failure of the Dakota to accommodate the evolving political situation
illustrates their dilemmas and struggles in the face of white intervention.
Thus the history of the Dakota mission reveals the limitations of both
the whites and the Indians that led to a clash between two cultures.
172 AYAKO UCHIDA
NOTES
1 Stephen R. Riggs to S. B. Treat, August 24, 1862, Papers of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions (deposited at Houghton Library, Harvard
University; hereafter cited as ABCFM) 18.3.7. vol. 3; J. M. Semernd**e, “One Hundred
Years of Missionary Work,” ABCFM 18.8. vol. 1:57:3–4.; Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and
I : Forty Years with the Sioux (Boston: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing
Society, 1880), 171–187. For studies on the Dakota War of 1862, see Kenneth Carley,
The Sioux Uprising of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1976); C. M. Oehler,
The Great Sioux Uprising (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997; first published in 1959);
Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative
Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 1988); Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (St. Paul:
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986).
2 Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in
Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), chap. 6; Robert F.
Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and
American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1965); William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and
Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), chap. 1; Clifton Jackson
Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), chap. 3.
3 For discussion of the missionaries as colonizers, see George E. Tinker, Missionary
Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1993).
4 For works focusing on the Indian response to Christianity, see “Special Issue: Native
American Women’s Response to Christianity,” Ethnohistory 43, 4 (1996); Michael
Harkin, “Power and Progress: The Evangelical Dialogue Among the Heilstuk,”
Ethnohistory 40, 1 (1993): 1–33; Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native
American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
5 They were volunteer missionaries who were later appointed by the American Board
in 1837. About Gideon H. Pond, see Riggs, Mary and I, 361–373. Foreign Roman
Catholic missionaries such as the Belgian Pierre Jean De Smet and the Frenchman
Augustin Ravoux also engaged in missionary work among the Sioux.
6 Semernd**e, “One Hundred Years of Missionary Work,” ABCFM 18.8. vol. 1:
57:1–2; “Lac-qui-parle and American Board Mission to the Sioux,” ABCFM 18.8. vol.
1: 59, 60. In 1872 Williamson was transferred to the Presbyterian Board but Riggs
remained in the American Board. In 1883, missionary work among the Dakota was transferred
to the American Missionary Association.
7 Riggs, Mary and I, 75, 79. Despite the civilizing enthusiasm there was a certain
opposition to the work of education within the mission circle as seen in Rufus Anderson,
senior secretary of the ABCFM in the mid nineteenth century. Hutchison, Errand to the
World, 77–90.
8 Riggs, Mary and I, 91.
9 Riggs, Mary and I, 73–74.
10 Riggs, Mary and I, 45–46.
11 About the spread of smallpox, see Riggs to D. Greene, March 28, 1838, ABCFM
18.3.7. vol. 2.
THE PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE 173
12 Riggs, Mary and I, 54–55; Stephen R. Riggs, Tah-Koo Wah-Kan; the Gospel among
the Dakotas (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1869), chap. 10.
13 Riggs, Mary and I, 101.
14 Riggs, Mary and I, 118–119.
15 Riggs, Mary and I, 76–78.
16 Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage, 107.
17 For Dakota customs and tradition, see Samuel W. Pond, The Dakota or Sioux in
Minnesota as They Were in 1834 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1986; first
published in 1908); Stephen R. Riggs, “Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography,” in
Contributions to North American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1893) vol. 9, 155–232.
18 Riggs to Greene, October 24, 1838, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 2.
19 For an example of conflicts with medicine men, see Riggs to Greene, February 8,
1846, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 220.
20 Riggs, Mary and I, 60, 100–101, 121, 388; Stephen Riggs, “Annual Report of the
Station at Traverse-des- Sioux,” May 1, 1844, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3.
21 Riggs, Mary and I, 110–111, 127–128, 388. For the attitude of the Ojibwa toward
mission cattle, see Rebecca Kugel, “Of Missionaries and Their Cattle: Ojibwa
Perceptions of a Missionary as Evil Shaman,” Ethnohistory 41, 2 (1994): 227–244.
22 Riggs, “Annual Report of the Station at Traverse-des- Sioux,” May 1, 1844, ABCFM
18.3.7. vol. 3; Riggs to Greene, February 8, 1846, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3; Riggs to
Greene, April 29, 1846, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3:223; Riggs, Tah-Koo Wah-Kan,
202–204, 220–230; Riggs, Mary and I, 91, 112–113.
23 Jon Willard, Lac qui Parle and the Dakota Mission (Madison, Minn.: Lac qui Parle
County Historical Society, 1964), 185-188, 194; Anderson, Little Crow, 38–43, 46–50.
24 Riggs, Mary and I, 128–129; Willard, Lac qui Parle and the Dakota Mission,
190–191.
25 Riggs to Treat, March 7, 1848, and March 24, 1849, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3:
244–245.
26 The fact was that the missionaries previously had received small grants from the
government school fund, but this fund had little effect on the efforts by the American
Board to educate the Dakota during this period. Riggs, Mary and I, 79; Riggs, Tah-koo
Wah-kan, 245–246; Willard, Lac qui Parle and the Dakota Mission, 198–201; Samuel
Pond to Treat, September 12, 1852, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3.
27 Riggs to Treat, March 7, 1848, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 244.
28 Riggs to Treat, October 15, 1852, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3; Riggs to M. McLeod,
February 12, 1851, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3; Williamson to Treat, February 10, 1851,
ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3.; Samuel Pond to Treat, June 23, 1851, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3.
29 Riggs, Mary and I, 160; Riggs to Treat, July 31, 1856, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 337,
347; Henok Maheyahdenapa, Secretary of Hazelwood Republic, “Declaration of
Sentiment,” February 26, 1857, a newspaper clipping in ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 46.
30 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x.
According to White the “middle ground” refers to “the place in between: in between cultures,
peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”
31 Riggs to Treat, December 9, 1859, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 357; Riggs to Treat,
February 22, 1861, ABCFM 18.3.7: vol. 4: 10; Riggs, Mary and I, 157. For an extensive
discussion of the “middle ground” in regard to the Dakota, see Daecee McLaren,
“Living the Middle Ground: Two Dakota Missionaries, 1887–1912,” Ethnohistory 43,
2 (1996), 277–305.
174 AYAKO UCHIDA
32 Anderson and Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes, 6.
33 Riggs to Treat, March 9, August 3 and 26, 1854, January 11, 1855, ABCFM 18.3.7.
vol. 3; Williamson to Treat, March 28, 1854, June 13, 1855, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3.
34 Anderson and Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes, 5.
35 Robert M. Ultey, The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846–1890
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 76–77.
36 Riggs to Treat, November 2, 1858, ABCFM 18.3.7. vol. 3: 347.
37 Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage, 145–146; Willard, Lac qui Parle and the
Dakota Mission, 181.
38 Anderson, Little Crow, 21–27. For discussion of the underground culture, see Joel
Martin, “From ‘Middleground’ to ‘Underground’” in David G. Hackett, Religion and
American Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 131.
39 Ultey, The Indian Frontier, 76–78; Riggs, Mary and I, 171–173.
40 Hanford L. Gordon, The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems (Chicago: Laird &
Lee, 1891), 343–344; Indian Legends and Other Poems (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press Co.,
1910), 381–383, cited in Anderson and Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes, 40–42.
41 For recollections of the war by members of the peace party, see Gabriel Renville,
“A Sioux Narrative of the Outbreak in 1862, and of Sibley’s Expedition in 1863,”
Minnesota Historical Society Collections 10 (1905): Part II, 595–618; Lorenzo
Lawrence, “Story of Lorenzo Lawrence,” 1894, Lorenzo Lawrence Papers, Division of
Libraries and Archives, Minnesota Historical Society; John Otherday, “Highly
Interesting Narrative of the Outbreak of Indian Hostilities,” Saint Paul Press, August
28, 1862, 2; Victor Renville, “A Sketch of the Minnesota Massacre,” Collections of the
State Historical Society of North Dakota 5 (1923): 251–272; Anderson and Woolworth,
eds., Through Dakota Eyes, 105–108, 120–125, 192–194, 200–201, 205–215.
42 Paul Mazakutemani, “Narrative of Paul Mazakutemane,” Minnesota Historical
Collections 3 (1880): 82–90.
43 Ultey, The Indian Frontier, 81; Anderson and Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota
Eyes, 171–172. Of the 303 convicted Indians, 17 were of the Upper Sioux and 286 of
the Lower Sioux; of the 38 who were hanged, two were of the Upper Sioux and 36 of
the Lower Sioux.
44 Semernd**e, “One Hundred Years of Missionary Work,” ABCFM 18.8. vol. 1: 57:
5–7.
THE PROTESTANT MISSION AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE 175
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