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"Kiyuksa"), to Red Wing's band as Eanbosandata, and to Little Crow's as Kapoja. Near the last village the party stopped for a time at an Indian cemetery consisting of several scaffolds holding coffins; "sometimes a trunk (purchased from a trader), at other times a blanket, or a roll of bark, conceals the body of the deceased." There were also several graves in which bones had been deposited after the flesh had decayed or been eaten by birds of prey. The village itself consisted of houses "formed by upright flattened posts, implanted in the ground, without any interval, except here and there some small loopholes for defence; these same posts support the roof, which presents a surface of bark." Before and behind each house was a scaffold used for drying corn, pumpkins, and other vegetables (p. 299 ).
Four Mdewakanton villages were passed on the Minnesota River. The first, which Keating called Oanoska, was presided over by Wamdetanka (Big Eagle), formerly dependent on Little Crow. This was what is usually known as Black Dog's village, located some three to five miles from the mouth of the St. Peter's, on the right bank. About seven miles farther upstream, also on the right bank, Long's party reached Tetankatane, or the Old Village, supposedly the center from which the Mdewakantons dispersed after their expulsion from the Mille Lacs region. It had been ruled by Wabasha's father before his removal to the Upper Iowa, and is the one referred to as Pinichon's village and later as Good Road's village. The next village was Taoapa, Shakopee's village, thirty miles up the river and on the left bank, consisting of fifteen large bark lodges and having a population of about three hundred, or about the same as Kapozha or Kiyuksa. The lodges and cornfields were in good order, arranged along the river, and there were the customary drying scaffolds, on which the explorers were told the Indians slept on very hot nights. One more Mdewakanton village, called Weakaote, was seen some six miles above the Little Rapids (near modern Le Sueur), a hamlet of two lodges and the ruins of a third. Later the party encountered the chief of the village, and were told that the Indians living there planned to move farther up the river (pp. 339 348, 401 - 402 ).
Except for Weakaote, the Mdewakanton villages reported by Keating are those which later white settlers found, in approximately the same locations. Some split-offs took place later, but in general the semisedentary Santees appear to have been settled in more or less permanent villages by this time. This was not, of course, true of the Wahpekutes, whose usual hunting grounds are given by Keating, although it does
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not appear that he actually saw many of them. According to Joseph Renville, who had joined the party as guide and interpreter at Fort Snelling, the Wahpekutes had the reputation among the other Indians of being a lawless band. They were said to live principally near the headwaters of the Cannon and Blue Earth rivers. Some of the Sissetons rendezvoused near the mouth of the Blue Earth, but a division of their people called the Kahra hunted mostly in the Lake Traverse-Red River area. The Wahpetons were found mainly near the headwaters of the Minnesota. Keating, relying on Renville's estimates, gave the population of the Mdewakantons as 1,500, of the Wahpekutes as 800, of the Sissetons as 2,500, and of the Wahpetons as 900. Adding to this 2,000 Yanktons, 5,200 Yanktonais, 14,400 Tetons, and 800 stragglers of one kind or another, he arrived at a total of 28, 100 for the entire Dakota nation (pp. 396, 402 - 403 ). Despite some over- and underestimates for particular bands, this is probably as reliable a figure as was offered before the Sioux began receiving annuities and census rolls were prepared.
Like other visitors, Keating had views of his own on the Sioux and their prospects. He saw them as a "noble ruin," no longer meeting at a common council fire, no longer going on the warpath in armies (as he supposed they had once done) but only in small bands of marauders. He postulated a golden age which had passed: "When they lighted the common calumet at the General Council Fire, it was always among the Mende Wahkanton, who then resided near Spirit Lake [Mille Lacs], and who were considered as the oldest band of the nation, their chiefs being of longer standing than those of the other tribes. . ." (pp. 442 443 ). Despite some hopeful signs among the agricultural bands, he felt that the Sioux had been corrupted by the white man. He thought that "the occasional supplies of these articles which they receive from the Indian agents and officers of our government, whenever they are in want of food, no doubt tend to encourage their lazy habits." Colonel Snelling, it was said, had once offered a chief the use of a plow and someone to teach him how to use it, so that his people might raise potatoes. The chief thought the proposition over, then replied that he would be a fool to accept it, as "his father always supplied him with provisions, as often as he was in need of them" (pp. 439 - 440 ).
The Sioux may have seemed a "noble ruin" to Keating in 1823, but their deterioration still had a long way to go. If the occasional distribution of goods by Taliaferro was so injurious as Keating supposed, how much more so were the annuities provided by later treaties, which Sibley saw as the real beginning of the Indians' decline. Taliaferro was
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not blind to the dangerous potentialities of the annuity system, but he wished to see that his charges received the best possible bargain, and he apparently thought that his efforts to promote agriculture among them would offset the debilitating effects of gratuities from the government. In this supposition he was wrong, as the second decade of his tenure at the St. Peter's Agency demonstrated.
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CHAPTER 3
Civilizing the Sioux
AS THE third decade of the nineteenth century ended, the Santee Sioux were entering a period of crisis that was to last thirty years and end in catastrophe. In all probability none of them recognized the symptoms for what they were, although the signs of change were already evident. There were more white men in their country than ever before--the soldiers even had a fort in the heart of the Santees' territory--and steamboats were coming up the river with increasing frequency. But much of the old culture was still intact. The changes that had taken place within the memory of a man were largely accessions from the white man's world, many of which made life more comfortable and more interesting.
One change, however, that was alarming to Indian and white alike was the depletion of game. Schoolcraft had noted as early as 1820 that the nearest bison in abundance were a two days' journey west of the Mississippi River villages; in Hennepin's day they had roamed the prairies immediately back from the river. The smaller game was also disappearing from the vicinity of the Indian settlements. Keating mentions the almost total absence of game of any kind on the Minnesota River in 1823. 1 Under these conditions, and with agriculture a
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1 Henry R. Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the United States, ed. by Mentor L. Williams ( East Lansing: Michigan State University
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negligible source of food, the Sioux were often hungry a good part of the year. The occasional handouts of provisions were not nearly enough to meet the needs of the recipients.
In Taliaferro's view, the solution was for the Indians to expand their meager farming and eventually become self-supporting. Whenever he held a council, he tried to impress on them the advantages of agriculture. He was much encouraged when, in his second summer at St. Peter's, the chief Black Dog remarked that every day he saw the whites plowing and wished that he had someone to show his people how to cultivate the soil in this fashion. 2 Apparently this wish led to no concrete results, but in the winter of 1828-1829 nature came to the agent's aid. During that severe winter the occupants of at least thirty lodges starved to death because of the shortage of game. Taliaferro had no supplies with which to help them, and he had been "compelled to be the witness of scenes the most unpleasant." The victims of this starving period were the nomadic Sioux from the upper Minnesota, but the Mdewakantons were also affected. The next spring they all left their villages in search of food of any kind. 3
This was the psychological moment for Taliaferro to press his agricultural schemes. An Indian named Mahpiya Wichasta, or Cloud Man, had been one of those who nearly starved on the prairie the previous winter, and he had at that time made a resolution to give farming a try if he lived through the ordeal. Together with one Kee-e-he-ie (He That Flies), father-in-law of the interpreter-farmer Philander Prescott, Cloud Man took the great step in the summer of 1829. Taliaferro sent out a soldier from the fort and two yoke of oxen, under Prescott's supervision, and they plowed for about a month in the vicinity of Lake Calhoun. Few Indians ventured out the first year, but the second year more came than there was work for, and some had to dig with hoes. The agent hired men to collect materials for a log village and for a building to protect the property of such Indians as "might submit to become cultivators of the soil." 4
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Press, 1953), p. 212; William H. Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Sources of St. Peter's River ( Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1959), pp. 302-303.
2 Taliaferro Journal, September 26, 1821.
3 Lawrence Taliaferro to William Clark, February 28, 1829, NARS, RG 75, LR; Taliaferro Journal, June 21, 1829.
4 Samuel W. Pond, "The Dakotas or Sioux in Minnesota as They Were in 1834," Minnesota Historical Colltctions, XII ( 1905- 1908), 326; Philander Prescott, "Autobiography and Reminiscences of Philander Prescott," in Minnesota Historical Collections, VI ( 1894), 482; Taliaferro to Secretary of War J ohn H. Eaton, February 23, 1830,
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Taliaferro took considerable pride in his experiment, which he named "Eatonville" after Jackson's Secretary of War. While in Washington early in 1830 he wrote to Eaton that the President had expressed a willingness to further the experiment; the agent thought that six or eight hundred dollars taken from the Indian civilization fund would "mature what has happily been begun. . . ." 5 His journal records frequent rides out to Eatonville, which was only six miles from Fort Snelling. Prescott was superintending work at the colony the next summer and, so far as he could, financing it out of his own pocket. When Taliaferro visited the village early in September, he found the Indians busy shucking and tying up their corn; as soon as they had finished collecting wild rice, they would dig their potatoes. Taliaferro instructed the women to save seed from the melons, squash, pumpkins, beans, peas, onions, cabbages, and other vegetables. 6 The Eatonville colony did not effect a revolution in the economy of the Sioux, and it eventually had to be abandoned because of its vulnerability to Chippewa attacks; but it demonstrated to Taliaferro's satisfaction that the Sioux could be taught to farm in a manner approximating that of white frontiersmen.
The project of civilizing the Sioux received a financial boost from a treaty negotiated in 1830 with the Sioux and several other tribes, who gathered at Prairie du Chien that July. Although the primary purpose of this treaty was to stop raids by the Sioux and the Sacs and Foxes into each other's territory, certain land cessions agreed to by the tribes involved payment. The Sioux ceded a twenty-mile-wide strip of land on their side of the dividing line set up in 1825, the Sacs and Foxes ceding a similar strip on their side. This forty-mile-wide "neutral strip" only aggravated relations between the tribes by tempting hunters from each to intrude upon it, but the land cession was compensated for by the government in the form of a $2,000 annuity to be paid for ten years in money, merchandise, or animals, at the chiefs' option. In addition, for the same period "and as long thereafter as the President of the United States may think necessary and proper," they were to be provided with
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NARS, RG 75, LR. Prescott was confused as to the year this experiment started, for he mentions that during the first year he and his crew cut a large number of tamarack logs for use in rebuilding the agency council house. It did not burn until August, 1830, and entries in Taliaferro Journal for 1829 make it clear that the Eatonville project was under way by the end of that summer. See also The Recollections of Philander Prescott: Frontiersman of the Old Northwest, ed. by Donald Dean Parker ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp. 126-129.
5 Taliaferro to Eaton, February 23, 1830, NARS, RG 75, LR.
6 Taliaferro Journal, August 24 and September 4, 1830. In the last entry he says the colony was established August 15, 1829.
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one blacksmith and the necessary tools, agricultural implements, and iron and steel to the amount of $700. An education fund was also set up, of which the Sioux were to receive benefits to the amount of $500 annually. The signers of this treaty included twenty-six Mdewakantons, nine Wahpekutes, and two Sissetons; no Wahpetons signed. Besides names recognizable as those of Wabasha, Little Crow, and Big Eagle, the chiefs who signed included Wacouta, or the Shooter, who had succeeded Tatankamani as chief of the Red Wing band in 1829; Wakinyan Tanka, or Big Thunder, soon to become chief at Kapozha; and Tachunk Washtay, or Good Road, the next chief of the old Pinichon village. 7
The annuities provided by the 1830 treaty were too small to have much effect, good or bad, on the Santee Sioux, but the blacksmith shop was a convenience for some. For years the bands near the agency had been having their work done by the agency smith; but because that location was inconvenient for Wabasha's band, now more than twice as large as any of the others, Taliaferro decided to place the new blacksmith shop at the Kettle Hills, just below the Kiyuksa village. 8
Although most of the dividing line between the Sioux and the Sac and Fox tribes was surveyed in 1832 and 1833, neither it nor the neutral strip through which it ran had any effect on the perennial warfare between the two tribes. In any case, during the Black Hawk War in 1832, some of the Sioux had a chance to vent their hatred of their enemies without incurring the displeasure of the government. Wabasha's band was invited to join the military and played a brief and inglorious role in the later stages of the campaign. After Black Hawk and his warriors had been pretty well beaten, Wabasha's braves fell upon a band of a hundred or so fugitives, half-starved and nearly defenseless, and slaughtered at least sixty-eight of them, including many women and children. 9 Retaliation was inevitable as soon as the Sacs and Foxes were somewhat recovered, and raiding back and forth continued for at least another decade.
If Taliaferro met with no success in his attempts to halt intertribal
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7 Charles. J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 305-309. For the report of Tatankamani's death, see the Taliaferro Journal, June 1829.
8 Taliaferro to Clark, September 1, 1834, NARS, RG 75, LR; Taliaferro journal, July 16, August 24 and 28, 1831.
9 Clark to Commissioner Elbert Herring, January 24, 1834, and. July 5, 1833; Clark to Herring, July 21, 1833; A. S. Hughes to Clark, December 31, 1833, NARS, RG 75, LR; William T. Hagan, The Sac and Fox Indians ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), pp. 191-192.
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warfare, he could take some comfort from the slow but substantial success of his Eatonville experiment, which in six years grew from two families to forty-five. So encouraging were the prospects that the agent wrote Superintendent Clark in 1833 that he could use two instructors in farming for the Sioux, who were "in a most destitute condition from the great and increasing scarcity of game." The next year he presented a more formal request to Indian Commissioner Elbert Herring. Since the education fund provided by the 1830 treaty had never been spent, he asked that it now be used to employ two men of "respectable character to instruct [the Indians] in the art of cultivating the soil." 10
Taliaferro had two men in mind when he made this request. That spring Gideon H. and Samuel W. Pond, young "volunteer missionaries" unconnected with any organized society, had come up the river to Fort Snelling with the intention of working among the Sioux. They were welcomed by Taliaferro and almost at once given an opportunity to show what they could do. The agent had always held that Indians must be civilized before being Christianized, but he had no objection to combining the two operations, as the Ponds proposed to do. They were given a place to live at the Lake Calhoun settlement, where about a year later they were joined by Thomas S. Williamson, Alexander G. Huggins, and their families, together with a sister of Mrs. Williamson. Bearing somewhat stronger credentials than the Ponds, they had been sent out by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Soon after their arrival Jedediah D. Stevens, who had made a preliminary visit to the agency in 1829, followed with his family. 11 Thus within a comparatively short time, the Santee Sioux, hitherto without missionaries, were virtually inundated with them.
Some rivalries developed at once, but a real impasse was avoided when Williamson accepted Joseph Renville's invitation to settle at his trading post on Lac qui Parle, near the headwaters of the Minnesota River. Gideon Pond joined him there the next spring. Stevens located at Lake Harriet, near the Eatonville colony, where Samuel Pond joined him in the spring of 1837, after being ordained the previous winter. That spring another missionary, Stephen Return Riggs, and his
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10 Taliaferro Journal, August 8, 1835; Taliaferro to Clark, August 2, 1833, and Taliaferro to Herring, July 23, 1834, NARS, RG 75, LR.
11 Stephen R. Riggs, "Protestant Missions in the Northwest," Minnesota Historical Collections, VI ( 1894), 126-127; Riggs, "The Dakota Mission," Minnesota Historical Collections, III ( 1870- 1880), 115-117.
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wife came to the Sioux country and settled at Lac qui Parle, which became the most successful of the numerous missionary efforts in the next two decades. 12
"Successful" is here a relative term. None of these mission stations accomplished much toward Christianizing the Indians before the reservation period of the fifties, and it was not until the morale of the Sioux was shattered by the aftermath of the Uprising in 1862 that wholesale conversions were made. For the missionaries those first years must have been extremely frustrating. The Lake Calhoun people were docile enough, and they were farming industriously, but they felt no desire to adopt the religion so assiduously preached by the white men who lived among them. At Lac qui Parle the support of Renville, who commanded great influence among the Indians, enabled the missionaries to gather a small congregation, made up almost entirely of women and mixedbloods at first but eventually including a few men. But here too the work was slow and unrewarding. 13
One of the most significant contributions of the missionaries was the reduction of the Dakota language to writing and the publication of books in that tongue. White men as far back as Hennepin had been compiling Dakota vocabularies, but nothing really systematic was done until the missionaries began their work. Their motive was not mere curiosity, of course, but a need to present their message in a form the Indians could understand. As Protestants, they regarded the use of the Bible in the vernacular as central to their task. Possessed of considerable linguistic ability, they availed themselves of such knowledge as had been accumulated by officers at Fort Snelling and others who had interested themselves in the Dakota language, and gradually acquired a knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary sufficient to enable them to translate portions of the Bible. Once books began to appear in Dakota, the missionaries' task of teaching the Indians to read and write was made easier. After they had been at work a little more than fifteen years, Riggs edited and the Smithsonian Institution published a monumental Grammar and Dictionary of the Dakota Language, which to a considerable degree fixed the written form of the language. From the very beginning the missionaries regarded the use of Dakota as a temporary expedient. They were convinced that its days as a living language were numbered, and in his introduction to the Grammar Riggs justified the project partly
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12 Riggs, "Protestant Missions in the Northwest," pp. 128-129.
13 Ibid., p. 130 ; Riggs, "The Dakota Mission," p. 118.
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on the grounds that the work might prove useful to future philologists after the language itself had died out. 14
During the years that Taliaferro was agent for the Sioux of the Mississippi, the conduct of Indian affairs was gradually being systematized, and a definite Indian department was taking shape within the War Department. When Taliaferro was first appointed in 1819, neither his duties nor the limits of his jurisdiction had been clearly defined. As time passed, however, many of the ambiguities of his position were resolved, along with those of other Indian agents. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824, but it was not until 1832 that a commissioner was appointed. Two years later a massive revamping and codification of practices and policies was incorporated in the legislation collectively known as the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834, which superseded a series of congressional acts dating back to 1793. The new legislation grew partly out of recommendations submitted several years earlier by Lewis Cass and William Clark, recommendations which in turn may have reflected Taliaferro's experiences with traders, the introduction of liquor, intertribal warfare, and other matters relating to Indian affairs. Among other things, these laws increased the agents' discretionary authority in dealing with the whiskey traffic and the licensing of traders. 15
Among the provisions of the new law was one amplifying earlier legislation dealing with Indian depredations on property owned by whites. This should not have been a serious problem at the St. Peter's Agency, since theoretically the only white people in the vicinity were government employees (including the Fort Snelling garrison), traders, and their families. As a matter of fact, however, there were squatters on the military reserve, chiefly refugees from the Earl of Selkirk's ill-fated Red River colony, and a number of mixed-bloods whose ties with the Indians kept them close to the Sioux villages. Members of all these groups had livestock, and it was inevitable that the Indians, whose legitimate hunting opportunities were diminishing, should occasionally kill a pig or an ox belonging to one of the whites, especially in the seasons of greatest hunger. Almost as soon as the new laws became known, depredations claims began coming in to the agent for his approval. It
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14 Riggs, "The Dakota Mission," pp. 120-124; Pond, "The Dakotas or Sioux . . . in 1834," p. 340; William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, I ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1956), pp. 199-200, 203.
15 Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 50, 59-60, 252, 266-267; U.S. Statutes at Large, IV, 729-732.
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was difficult for the claimants to obtain evidence that would stand legal scrutiny, since the Indians would rarely admit having destroyed any livestock. Consequently most such claims, at least in the early years, came to a dead end before ever reaching the Indian Office, which was extremely cautious about honoring those that did pass local inspection. 16
Another problem aggravated by the presence of the settlers was the introduction of whiskey among the Indians and among the soldiers at Fort Snelling. Neither Taliaferro nor Major John Bliss, commander at the fort from 1833 to 1836, really wanted to expel the settlers, though they wished to discourage further immigration and to have those who tried to sell liquor removed. Taliaferro recognized that there would be occasional conflicts when whites and Indians were in close proximity but took the view that those who behaved themselves might as well be allowed to stay. 17
Taliaferro's long tenure in office gave him a knowledge of his Indians and continuity enjoyed by few agents then or afterward. By the middle thirties he could look back over the years of his service and see what changes had taken place in the Indians over whom he exercised jurisdiction. What he saw did not please him. Despite his high hopes, the treaty of 1830 had not accomplished what it had been expected to, and the material and moral condition of the Santee Sioux was getting worse with each passing year. The answer, it seemed to the agent, lay in another treaty, by which the Indians could cede lands they no longer needed--specifically, those east of the Mississippi--and receive in return benefits that would set them on the road to civilization and security. Apart from the advantages such a cession would bring to the
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16 Statement of Jacob Falstrom, dated August 27, 1834; Remarks by Chiefs at Payment, July 2, 1835; Affidavit dated June 5, 1835, signed by Taliaferro, John Bliss, et al., NARS, RG 75, LR. Falstrom claimed to have lost an ox to the Indians. J. B. Faribault swore that the Indians of Little Crow's band had killed fifteen hogs, a horse, and a bull, that those of Shakopee's band had killed thirty-five hogs and pigs, two horses, and a bull, and that Black Dog's band had killed nineteen hogs and a horse. Some of these losses, having been incurred in 1831, were rendered uncollectable under the law of 1834, which set a three-year limitation on claims. The Indians admitted killing thirteen of Faribault's pigs but denied all the other charges. They also claimed that white men had killed two of their horses. The commission that examined the evidence concluded that, except for the thirteen pigs, none of the claims could be allowed in as much as it was impossible to prove any particular band of Indians guilty.
17 Bliss to Clark, April 30, 1835; Bliss to Lewis Cass, April 30, 1836; Taliaferro to Bliss, April 22, 1836, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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Indians, it would satisfy the growing pressure for the opening up to exploitation of the timber resources in what is now western Wisconsin and east-central Minnesota. Taliaferro hoped that it would also reduce the chance of collisions between the Chippewas and the Mississippi bands of Sioux. 18
A detailed proposal for a treaty was submitted to Superintendent Clark in 1836, but it received a cool reception from both Clark and Commissioner Herring. Later in the year, however, the St. Peter's Agency was transferred to the jurisdiction of Governor Henry Dodge of Wisconsin Territory, who looked upon it with more enthusiasm, as did the new Indian Commissioner, Carey A. Harris. 19 The only opposition to such a treaty seemed to come from the fur traders, whose prosperity depended on keeping the status quo in Indian affairs. Taliaferro knew that they could be reconciled to a treaty if they stood to gain by it through a stipulation that part of the price paid by the government would go directly to them as payment for uncollected debts owed them by the Indians. But he also knew that such an arrangement with the traders would either increase the cost to the government or diminish the benefits received by the Indians, or both; and in any case he was opposed to any strategy that would be advantageous to the traders.
The treaty that was finally hammered out and imposed on the Indians was partly a victory for Taliaferro, partly a victory for the traders. In the summer of 1837 the agent was instructed to arrange for a delegation of Sioux to go to Washington and there negotiate a peace settlement with a delegation of Sacs and Foxes. The twenty-six Sioux that he managed to round up seem to have been under the impression that this was the sole purpose of the trip, but when the Sacs and Foxes failed to appear, a treaty drawn up before they ever left the agency was signed, providing for the cession of the lands east of the Mississippi and the islands in that river. 20
Taliaferro and his party left the agency August 18, went down the Mississippi and up the Ohio by steamboat as far as Pittsburgh, thence to Philadelphia and on to Washington by a combination of canal, railroad, and stagecoach. They arrived in the capital September 15 and were taken to the Globe Hotel, where they stayed for the next twentyfour days. The twenty-six Indians were housed and fed for a total cost
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18 Taliaferro to Clark, May 15, 1836, ibid.
19 Clark to Herring, June 9, 1836; Taliaferro to Governor Henry Dodge, November 30, 1836; Dodge to Commissioner Carey A. Harris, April 18, 1837, ibid.
20 Taliaferro to Dodge, August 2 and 21, 1837, ibid.; "Auto-Biography of Maj. Lawrence Taliaferro," Minnesota Historical Collections, VI ( 1894), 217-219.
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of $640; Taliaferro and the interpreters were charged slightly higher rates. Presumably an effort was made to impress the Indians with the splendor and might of the white man's civilization, but no details of their entertainment appear in Taliaferro's correspondence. Six had their portraits painted (any smaller number would lead to ill feeling, the agent said), and all were given medals, some of which were stolen on the way home. The return trip began October 9 and took about a month. As on the way east, many of the Indians were ill, owing to the change of water and diet, but all made it back safely, despite a boiler explosion on board the Rolla below Rock Island. 21
All manner of impediments had been placed in Taliaferro's way before, during, and after the trip. In the first place, many of the Sioux were reluctant to go because there had been an attack by the Sacs and Foxes just before their departure. Then the traders made a strenuous effort to prevent the delegation from going (after failing to write into the preliminary draft of the treaty all the provisions they wished to see in it) and interfered again at Prairie du Chien. Taliaferro was obliged to give the Indians presents to the amount of $1,200 before they would consent to move. Several traders accompanied the delegation, and others followed it. While in Washington the Indians were subjected to various pressures, of which perhaps the most pernicious was that of one Samuel C. Stambaugh, sutler at Fort Snelling and a sort of professional meddler, who succeeded in alienating some of the Indians from their agent, apparently in hopes of supplanting him. Taliaferro had previously objected to Stambaugh's being in on the negotiations, but he was unable to prevent his coming along. The interference of Stambaugh and the traders of course infuriated Taliaferro. In a note to James Maher, proprietor of the Globe Hotel, thanking him for the hospitality extended to the delegation, he apologized for his hasty departure, saying that he had "had many rascals to deal with." Stambaugh later had the effrontery to submit to the Indian Office a bill for his hotel expenses while in Washington. 22
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21 Taliaferro to Captain Martin Scott, August 16, 1837; Taliaferro to Dodge, August 20 and 21, November 4, 1837; Taliaferro to Harris, September 5 and 8, n.d. [written in Washington], November 10, 1837; Bill for housing and feeding Indians, signed by James Maher (undated), NARS, RG 75, LR; "Auto-Biography of Maj. Lawrence Taliaferro," pp. 217-219. For a lively description of the typical treatment accorded Indian delegations visiting Washington, see Katharine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951).
22 Taliaferro to Dodge, August 21, 1837; Taliaferro to Harris, September 8 and n.d., 1837; Taliaferro to James Maher, October 11, 1837; Samuel C. Stambaugh to Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, February 23, 1838, NARS, RG 75, LR. Stambaugh
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Considering its immense importance in the history of the Sioux, the treaty itself was brief. In return for the lands ceded, the United States promised to invest the sum of $300,000 and to pay to the chiefs and braves annually forever an income of not less than five per cent, "a portion of said interest, not exceeding one third, to be applied in such manner as the President may direct" (an "education fund" that was to cause trouble later), the rest to be paid in specie or in goods, as the Indians might specify. The relatives and friends of the tribe having not less than one quarter Indian blood were to receive a sum of $110,000, and the traders were to receive $90,000 in payment of the just debts of the tribe. Further, an annuity of $10,000 in goods was to be paid for twenty years and $8,250 spent annually during the same period for the purchase of medicines, agricultural implements and stock, and for the support of a physician, farmers, and blacksmiths, and for "other beneficial objects." In order to get the civilization program under way, upon ratification of the treaty $10,000 was to be spent for the immediate purchase of agricultural implements, cattle, and mechanics' tools. For twenty years the Indians were to receive provisions to the amount of $5,500 annually. Finally, they were to be paid $6,000 in goods upon their arrival at St. Louis on their way home. The twenty-one signers of the treaty, all Mdewakantons, included most of the chiefs and headmen whose names appeared on the treaty of 1830, with the exception of Little Crow and Wabasha, who had died, the latter in a smallpox epidemic that had carried off much of his band in 1836. 23
Once back on their home ground, the Indians, traders, and others settled down to await ratification of the treaty. One of the weaknesses of the constitutional requirement that treaties be ratified by the Senate was the long delay that always intervened between the signing of a
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asked $275 for hotel expenses and $140 for other expenses on the way. The St. Peter's Agency file for 1837 includes two undated letters to the Secretary of War, purporting to be from the chiefs but in Stambaugh's handwriting. One of them bears the notation by Taliaferro: "This paper is in Col. Stambaugh's own hand writing. Will go to show to the Dept. my objections to him generally."
23 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 493-494. Two treaties had been made in 1836 by which the eastern Sioux relinquished their shadowy claim to lands in southwestern Iowa and northwestern Missouri. On September 10 the "Lower Mdewakantons " (Wabasha's band) entered into such a treaty, for which they received $400, and on November 30 an identical treaty was made with the Wahpekutes, Sissetons, and "Upper Mdewakantons" (the other bands), who received $550 in goods. These treaties were of negligible importance to the bands concerned. See ibid., II, 466-467, 481-482.
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treaty and the beginning of the benefits it granted. In this case nearly nine months elapsed between the signing and the formal proclamation, and of course there was an additional delay before the promised annuities could begin arriving at the agency. It was a period of much anxiety. At the agency (from which Taliaferro was, as usual, absent most of the winter) hunger and unrest created a tense situation. Upon his return, he found that the nervousness and suspicion of the Indians had increased and that they were venting their feelings in violence. The son of the trader Provençalle had been killed and Joseph R. Brown wounded by angry Indians, and as a result the American Fur Company had withdrawn its trade from the Sioux. Together with the failure of the winter hunt, this deprivation contributed to a mood of reckless desperation among the Indians. As the weeks passed without news of ratification, Taliaferro's letters to his superiors became increasingly shrill, almost hysterical in tone. "Give me something satisfactory by which the feelings of the Indians may be calmed--otherwise I shall not deem my residence here safe among them--and of consequence must . . . leave the Agency," he begged, adding by way of defense, "What mortal man could do--has been done, and will continue to be done to keep my miserable, and starving people quiet until we hear from you." News of the ratification must have come shortly after this, for Taliaferro's letters were calmer a month later. 24
The Indians still had a while to wait before receiving any tangible benefits from the treaty, and when these came they were far from satisfactory. The first annuities, distributed in October, created much ill feeling among the Indians, who claimed that the goods were both insufficient in quantity and inferior in quality. Only by promising that there would be an improvement the next year and that the annuities would arrive by June 1--a promise he was later to regret--was Taliaferro able to persuade the Indians to accept the goods. 25
Implementing the treaty of 1837 presented several challenges for the agent. He decided to avoid ill feeling among the bands by hiring a farmer for each village if he could find that many who would work for the low salaries specified in the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834. He met
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24 Scott Campbell to Taliaferro, February 13, 1838; Taliaferro to Harris, February 21, June 5, and June 28, 1838; Taliaferro to Dodge, July 31, 1838, NARS, RG 75, LR. Campbell, Taliaferro's mixed-blood interpreter, was left in charge of the agency during the winter. In the letter cited he asked if Taliaferro had any news of the treaty: "Here I learn nothing but the blabbering of indian traders & other Idiots," he wrote.
25 Taliaferro to Poinsett, August 27, 1839, ibid.
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this problem by placing the missionaries, who received most of their support from their respective religious societies, on the payroll as farmers. Besides the stations previously mentioned, two Swiss missionaries, Samuel Denton and Daniel Gavin, were located at the Red Wing village; and a Methodist mission under Thomas W. Pope was working with little success at Kapozha. Denton, Samuel Pond, and Pope were hired in the fall of 1838, and the next year Stevens, formerly at Lake Harriet, was appointed farmer at Wabasha's village. The other three bands were supplied with men not connected with the mission stations. 26 Although blacksmiths were also hard to get at the salaries the Indian Office was willing to pay, Taliaferro filled this need late in 1838. 27 The accomplishments of the blacksmiths and farmers were not notable during the remainder of Taliaferro's term as agent, but they became fixtures on the local scene in the next decade and did something to prepare the Indians for the reservation period.
So far as the Indians were concerned, the treaty of 1837 solved few of the problems it was intended to solve, and it created some new ones. Besides postponing the day when they would become self-supporting, the Indians' growing dependence on annuities made for a decidedly uncomfortable situation when they arrived late, as they usually did. Payment in money proved disadvantageous to the Indians because the traders simply marked up their prices and extracted that much more for their goods. The "education fund," as it was called, proved an especially sore spot. When the Indians did not receive the $5,000 that the treaty had specified was to be supplied as the President might direct, they complained at the first payment. 28 Later, either on their own initiative or at the suggestion of the traders, they concluded that this fund was being secretly paid to the missionaries and that if they could somehow sabotage the schools, the money would be paid to them.
Yet another unfortunate effect of the treaty, which surely Taliaferro must have foreseen, was that the east bank of the Mississippi was soon lined with whiskey sellers. Though unable to enter the Indian country, they were in no way prevented from selling to any Indians who chose
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26 Taliaferro to Dodge, September 10, 1838; Dodge to Harris, October 16, 1838; Taliaferro to Governor Robert Lucas, May 24 and June 5, 1839, ibid.; 25th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Doc. 103, pp. 14, 16, 18. Samuel Pond gave it as his opinion that the position of farmer was regarded as a sinecure and that most of the men so employed hired out their plowing and did little work themselves. See Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 197 n.
27 Taliaferro to Dodge, September 10, 1838, NARS, RG 75, LR.
28 Remarks of chiefs at annuity payment, October 17, 1838, ibid.
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to cross the river into their old hunting grounds. This problem became increasingly serious as the hamlet of St. Paul came into being in the forties, for it consisted chiefly of groggeries in its early years. All these unanticipated results of the treaty made Taliaferro's position a veritable hornet's nest during his last year at the St. Peter's Agency.
As if these troubles were not enough, the continuing warfare between the Sioux and the Chippewas reached a crescendo in 1839. There had been minor clashes in 1835 and 1836 and a bigger one in April, 1838, when a party of Chippewas appeared in the Sioux country, were hospitably entertained by a small hunting party, and then murdered nearly all of their hosts. An unsuccessful attempt at retaliation was made a few months later, but the real explosion came in the summer of 1839, when a close relative of Cloud Man was killed and the Sioux took terrible revenge on several bands of Chippewas who had come to Fort Snelling in the mistaken belief that their annuities would be paid there. Following their enemies toward their homes, the Kapozha and Minnesota River Mdewakantons fell upon them and killed nearly a hundred, while losing twenty-three of their own men. Folwell is probably right in saying that this outbreak "much weakened Major Taliaferro's confidence in his ability to control his red children by fine words and fair treatment." 29
He was having even more serious troubles that summer. Although five steamboats had come up the river by June 3, the annuities, which he had promised the Indians would be there by June 1, had not arrived. By July 12 they had still not arrived, nor had the funds to pay the farmers and other employees. Shortly afterward part of the goods and provisions came, but there was still no money to pay the employees, and the blacksmith shops were idle for want of materials. Once more Taliaferro began to bombard the Indian Office with anxious appeals, climaxing the barrage with a letter of resignation. His officially stated reason was poor health, dating back to his service on the Niagara frontier in 1814, but in a letter to Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett a few weeks later he made it clear that he had other reasons. Deprived of the means of holding the Indians' faith in him and threatened with assassination, he saw no course but to resign. 30
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29 Thomas S. Williamson to Taliaferro, April 28, 1838, ibid.; Samuel W. Pond, "Indian Warfare in Minnesota," Minnesota Historical Collections, III ( 1870- 1880), 131 - 133. This incident is given extended treatment in Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 154 - 158. Folwell account is based on the Taliaferro Journal, among other sources, and differs in some details from Pond.
30 Taliaferro to Lucas, June 3 and July 12, 1839; Taliaferro to Commissioner THartley Crawford.

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Although Taliaferro's letter of resignation was so phrased as to leave the door open for its rejection (he had been given another four-year appointment in April), his remarks in a letter written after he had left the agency suggest that he was only too happy to be back at his home in Bedford, Pennsylvania. He wrote Commissioner T. Hartley Crawford that he was "most happy to be relieved from a Post, and Country, which must from the nature, and designs of a certain class of Mongrels . . . produce ere long a North Western Indian War." 31 Thus, on a note of savage bitterness, ended Lawrence Taliaferro's twenty years of service to the Santee Sioux.
Taliaferro had reason to be bitter. For nearly twenty years he had exerted himself to make the Sioux an agricultural people, but not until the last year of his service as agent did he have the funds to begin the project on a large scale, and then he was too harried to make adequate use of the opportunity. Ironically, it was his successors who received credit for whatever small success was finally achieved in the endeavors for which he had prepared the ground. His immediate successor, Amos J. Bruce, was a less aggressive man, and perhaps as a consequence his eight years as agent were more tranquil than Taliaferro's last two. He got on well with Taliaferro's old enemies, the traders--perhaps too well. There was less trouble with the Chippewas in the forties, and Bruce had more weapons at his disposal in dealing with such conflicts as there were. He was also aided by somewhat greater punctuality in the delivery of annuity provisions, although the money annuities and sometimes the funds for running the agency continued to arrive late.
Bruce's chief task was to persuade the Sioux to become farmers in the fashion of frontier whites so that they would no longer have to depend so heavily on the chase. The Indians' cultural crisis was primarily economic, as Taliaferro had recognized. Although the missionaries' preoccupation with saving souls led them unwittingly to introduce new sources of conflict, their efforts to induce the Indians to farm made them useful instruments in the agent's civilization scheme. Less can be said of the other tools he had to work with. Then as later, the Indian Bureau had to carry out its assigned task with imperfect materials.
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Hartley Crawford, July 15, 1839; Taliaferro to Poinsett, July 16 and August 27, 1839, NARS, RG 75, LR. A postscript to his letter of resignation says: "I have the sad consolation of leaving after twenty seven years the public service as poor as when I first entered --the only evidence of my integrity. Will Schoolcraft, and some one or two others believe this? from the oldest agent in the Dept."
31 Taliaferro to Crawford, December 12, 1839, ibid.
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Bruce himself was a political appointee, and the people who worked for him were by and large animated by no burning zeal to help the Indians. Many of the government farmers, especially, were time-servers, some utterly incompetent. 32
Even had these men been better qualified for their jobs, they would have been up against formidable obstacles. The semisedentary Mdewakantons practiced what was essentially a hoe culture, and their opposition to the use of the plow was not merely laziness but an actual religious objection, based on the notion that plowing would injure their fields. Besides, working in the fields was women's work, scorned by men who had been trained to be hunters and warriors. Despite occasional breakthroughs, such as when Cloud Man or the Sisseton chief Mazasha put their hands to the plow, practically all the farming was left to the women or the white employees. And when work oxen were issued to the Indians, they were as likely as not to be killed for food. 33
Even if the Indians did show some industry, there was always a chance that a flood or drought would wipe out their crops. Flood damage was restricted to the villages on the lower Minnesota and occurred only infrequently. For the Indians living near the headwaters of that river, however, drought came often enough to cause them real hardship. The people living at Lac qui Parle, Lake Traverse, and Big Stone Lake, who were not parties to the treaty of 1837 and whose annuities under the earlier treaty expired in 1840, were repeatedly described as destitute and starving. 34
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32 Amos J. Bruce to Representative John Miller, February 19, 1840; Bruce to Crawford, September 15, 1842, ibid. Stevens, the erstwhile missionary who had been appointed farmer at Wabasha's village, failed even to maintain a residence there but instead built himself a house some eight or ten miles away, on the Wisconsin side of the river. Bruce discharged him. There was a high rate of turnover among the government farmers, even under Bruce's mild regime, and his successor fired the entire lot.
33 Bruce to Lucas, November 11, 1840; Robert Hopkins and Alexander Huggins to Superintendent Thomas H. Harvey, September 29, 1848, ibid.
34 Governor John Chambers to Crawford, November 22, 1842; Bruce to Crawford, December 13, 1842; Crawford to Secretary of War John C. Spencer, October 7, 1842; Joseph R. Brown to Bruce, September 1, 1846; Bruce to Governor James Clarke, September 12, 1846; Clarke to Commissioner William Medill, October 5, 1846, ibid. Bruce reported in the spring of 1843 that the traders, missionaries, and the Fort Snelling garrison had rendered assistance to the destitute Indians. The squaws and children were admitted to the fort briefly every day to collect table scraps. Sibley had sent sixty bushels of corn to the band at the Little Rapids, along with some pork furnished by the officers at the fort. Bruce hoped "to keep life in most of them" until the ducks and geese arrived. See Bruce to Chambers, April 3, 1843, ibid. It is noteworthy that by this time the Sissetons and Wahpetons had to some extent adopted agriculture.
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Because of all these hindrances, progress in making farmers out of the Sioux was extremely slow. In his last annual report Taliaferro spoke of the government's efforts in their behalf and provided statistics to show that some progress was being made. Yet he was not optimistic about the prospects. The Indians' habits of indolence and their "total disregard and want of knowledge of the value and uses of time and property" seemed to militate against any rapid progress toward selfsufficiency. 35 Seven years later Bruce, perhaps with Taliaferro's report before him, mentioned the same characteristics, which in his eyes almost forbade "any hope of their improvement, either in morals or intellect." Three years later Philander Prescott, now head farmer for the several bands, reported little progress, except among the Red Wing band, which appeared more willing than the others to adopt the customs of white men. The total acreage under cultivation was still small, and the plowing was still being done almost entirely by the government farmers. 36
In comparison with the massive revolution that the Indian Office and its agents had hoped to effect, the farming done by the Sioux prior to the reservation period of 1853-1862 was negligible. This short-range view led the agent in 1848 to complain despairingly that the $4,200 a year that the farming enterprise had been costing was more than it would have cost the government to buy as much corn as the Indians raised. 37 If there had been anyone around who realized how slow and halting any culture change necessarily is, he might have felt that quite a bit had been accomplished in the decade of the 1840's.
At the same time that the agent and his employees were trying to transform the Sioux into farmers, the missionaries were teaching them to read and write. The missionary activities begun in the middle thirties expanded greatly in the next decade. Besides the remote Lac qui Parle station, which went on steadily with its work in the face of mounting difficulties, new missions were started and old ones moved to new sites. After the savage outbreak of war between the Sioux and the Chippewas in 1839, the Lake Calhoun village was abandoned out of fear of retaliation, and the band moved to a more protected site on the Minnesota River. In 1843 the Ponds rejoined Cloud Man's people there, and a few years later Samuel Pond accepted an invitation to open
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35 26th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 126, p. 494.
36 29th Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 4, p. 245; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, pp. 1054-1055.
37 30th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Doc. 1, pp. 474-475.
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a school at Shakopee's village, now on the right bank of the Minnesota. 38
A newstation was opened in 1843 by Riggs and others at Traverse des Sioux, where Mazasha's small Sisseton band lived. Some of these people were hostile to the missionaries and persecuted them, while others were friendly enough, if incurably mendicant, and made occasional gestures in the direction of farming. The Methodist mission struggled along for a time but was finally abandoned in 1842. The Swiss mission at Red Wing was given up in 1846 and replaced two years later by an American Board mission, which sent John F. Aiton there. Aiton and Joseph W. Hanthingy, who arrived the following year, attempted to revive the school conducted earlier by Gavin and Denton. Although the chief, Wacouta, is uniformly described as a man of high character, friendly and co-operative toward the whites, the Indians' indifference to education and their habit of being away hunting a large part of the year made this school no more of a success than the others. 39
Ironically, the biggest obstacle to the success of these mission schools was the education fund provided by the treaty of 1837. Although the Indian Office sent the money along each year with the rest of the annuities, no instructions for its disbursement ever accompanied it. Each year Bruce would ask for instructions, and then, receiving none, he would deposit the money in the Bank of Missouri at St. Louis. The only part of the fund he ever used was the sum of $500 given to the Methodist mission in 1841. 40 The Indians, who were acquiring a certain degree of sophistication where money matters were concerned, were understandably puzzled by the nonappearance of this portion of the annuity they were supposed to receive under the terms of the treaty. They apparently got wind of the $500 turned over to the Methodist mission and concluded that the rest of it was going to the other missionaries. Obviously, the way to get what was coming to them was to sabotage the schools and force them to close.
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38 Riggs, "Protestant Missions in the Northwest," p. 131; "The Dakota Mission," pp. 120, 123.
39 Riggs, "The Dakota Mission," p. 121; Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), p. 100 ; 28th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 354-355; Thomas S. Williamson to Harvey, August 15, 1848, NARS, RG 75, LR; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 1064; [ Joseph W. Hanthingy], Goodhue County, Minnessota, Past and Present ( Red Wing: Red Wing Printing Co., 1893), p. 50. Hanthingy stayed at Red Wing after the Indians left and became a prominent citizen and the holder of several county offices.
40 Bruce to Chambers, May 24, 1841; Bruce to Crawford, August 15, September 1, and October 31, 1841, and July 5, 1843, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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When the Ponds reopened their school at Oak Grove, Cloud Man's new village, and the Traverse des Sioux station was started, they and the older schools suffered from the opposition of many of the Indians, including the influential chiefs. The trouble seems to have started in 1843, appearing first in the villages nearest Prairie du Chien and gradually moving up the Mississippi and the Minnesota, so that by the end of the summer it had reached even the remote Lac qui Parle post, whose Indians had no direct interest in the education fund. Here children were ordered to stay out of school, and those who defied the order had their clothes cut to shreds by members of the soldiers' lodge. The missionaries' cattle were killed and their lives threatened. So serious did the harassment become that when Bruce invited him, in 1846, to start a school at Kapozha, Williamson eagerly embraced the opportunity to leave Lac qui Parle. 41
Williamson tended, like his fellows, to interpret their difficulties in spiritual terms. "God seems to have withdrawn his spirit and it is hard to interest the people in learning anything good," he complained, recalling that a few years earlier "numbers here [at Lac qui Parle] were inquiring what they must do to be saved." 42 Yet he understood very clearly the practical reasons for the difficulties he and his fellow missionaries were experiencing and had concrete proposals for remedying the situation. Like most of those who interested themselves in Indian education during the nineteenth century, he believed that the children should be separated from their parents as early as possible. By way of apology for the poor attendance at the Kapozha school, he insisted that an Indian village was no place to teach children to work or to speak English, "in sight of their relatives who think it disgraceful to do either and are spending most of their time in gaming ball playing swimming and other amusements." To overcome such evil influences, he proposed a manual labor boarding school, to be supported jointly by the government and the American Board. 43 But before he could impress his ideas on the policymakers in Washington, the Sioux had been removed from Kapozha and their other traditional villages.
The decade of the forties, like the previous one, was largely a period
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41 28th Gong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 354-355, 377-378; 29th Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 4, p. 313; Williamson to Bruce, June 30 and August 12, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR.
42 Williamson to Bruce, June 30, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR.
43 Williamson to Medill, October 19, 1847; Williamson to Harvey, August 15, 1848; Williamson to Commissioner Orlando Brown, February 26, 1850, ibid.
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of failure and frustration for the missions. They recorded a few conversions, taught a few people to read and write, and possibly created in the minds of the Indians a more favorable image of the white man than that produced by association with the traders, soldiers, and government officials. But in terms of their primary purpose they accomplished little. Samuel Pond was reporting objective fact when he wrote, many years later, "Before the outbreak of 1862 I saw very few Dakotas who seemed to give evidence of piety. A few at Oak Grove, a few at Lac Qui Parle, and that was all." 44 With the advantage of hindsight, the missionaries were later to speak of this as a period of sowing, the fruits of which were to appear later. Perhaps they were right, but at the end of the forties no fruition was in evidence.
Besides the mismanagement of the education fund and the cultural inertia that led the Indians to reject the efforts to make farmers of them, there were other obstacles to the work of the agents and missionaries, one of which was the failure of the government to fulfill its promises. When Governor James D. Doty of Wisconsin territory was negotiating with the Sioux for the cession of their lands in 1841, he listened sympathetically to their complaints of deficiencies in the annuity payments made up to that time. The Indians told Doty that they had no doubt that the Great Father had started their things on the way to them, "but after they leave Washington the road is very long and some of the boxes get holes in them . . . and their dollars and goods drop out." 45 When the annuity goods and provisions did arrive, they often were not what the Indians wanted or what the agent had requested. Bruce always sent in specific requisitions for articles the Indians could use, but the contractors had their own notions of what they would furnish, and the anuity goods sometimes contained screw augers, knives and forks, pewter teasthingys, and other items for which the Indians had little use and less desire. 46
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44 Samuel W. Pond Jr., Two Volunteer Missionaries Among the Dakotas ( Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1893), p. 219 ; S. W. Pond Narrative, I, 82 (cited by Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 212).
45 James D. Doty to President John Tyler, August 13, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR.
46 Bruce to Lucas, October 6, 1840; Bruce to Chambers, September 15, 1842, ibid. Bruce's first requisition included three hundred guns, with appropriate quantities of lead, powder, powder horns, flints, and the like; four thousand pounds of tobacco; fifty pounds of thread; 330 blankets of various colors and sizes; cloth handkerchiefs; yarn; a hundred dozen scalping knives (while he tried to keep the Indians at peace); fifty looking glasses; combs; tin pans; kettles; squaw axes; ribbon; vermilion; scissors; and other items to the amount of $10,000 as well as $700 worth of agricultural im0plements and work oxen, harnesses, etc.
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Another source of difficulty in the 1840's was the increasing power that the traders came to wield over the Indians. The conditions under which they operated were radically altered during this period. The supply of furs dwindled rapidly, and the Indians, blessed with annuities, no longer hunted as assiduously as they had earlier. Instead of trading manufactured goods for peltries, the traders now exchanged them for the money the Indians were receiving. Credit was still extended liberally, since the traders had learned that debts owed by Indians could be collected from the government by means of a properly constructed treaty. As the ceded lands cast of the Mississippi filled with settlers, a fierce tug-of-war began between the so-called independent traders, many of whom were chiefly dispensers of whiskey, and the licensed traders of the old American Fur Company. On the whole, the independent traders did the most harm to the Indians, whose addiction to whiskey brought them to new depths of degradation. Gideon Pond has left a striking description of the orgy that followed the payment in 1839, when the Indians
bade fair to die, all together, in one drunken jumble. They must be drunk-they could hardly live if they were not drunk.--Many of them seemed as uneasy when sober, as a fish does when on land. At some of the villages they were drunk months together. There was no end to it. They would have whisky. They would give guns, blankets, pork, lard, flour, corn, coffee, sugar, horses, furs, traps, any thing for whisky. It was made to drink--it was good --it was wakan. They drank it,--they bit off each other's noses,--broke each other's ribs and heads, they knifed each other. They killed one another with guns, knives, hatchets, clubs, fire-brands; they fell into the fire and water and were burned to death, and drowned; they froze to death, and committed suicide so frequently, that for a time, the death of an Indian in some of the ways mentioned was but little thought of by themselves or others. 47
Like the white man's liquor, his diseases wrought havoc among the Indians. Smallpox struck in the middle 1830's, and in 1846 and 1847 cholera and "bilious fever" raged through the river villages, "carrying [the Indians] off at a fearful rate," according to Bruce. Whooping cough was also a widely prevalent ailment and accounted for many deaths, especially among children. 48 Yet the Mdewakantons, the only
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47 Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 209, citing "The Treaty with the Mdewakantonwan and Warpekute Bands of Dakotas," Dakota Tawaxitku Kin, or the Dakota Friend, I, No. 11 ( St. Paul, September 1851).
48 26th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 126, p. 495; 30th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 8, p. 844; Bruce to Harvey, August 21, 1847, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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band receiving annuities and thus the only one for which reasonably accurate figures are available, continued to increase throughout the 1840's. From 1,668 in 1839 they increased to 1,776 in 1841, and 1,938 in 1843. Despite the cholera epidemic, they were up to 2,141 in 1846 and to 2,200 in 1849. It is impossible to determine how much of this population growth is due to natural increase and how much to accessions from the non-annuity bands, but it is unlikely that the Mdewakantons would welcome sizable additions to their numbers, since these would reduce their per capita benefits. Figures for the other subtribes are unreliable, but in 1846 Bruce reported 555 Wahpekutes, 862 Wahpetons, and 1,188 Sissetons, plus some mixed Sisseton and Yankton bands numbering altogether 2,612. 49
Another obstacle to the agents' and missionaries' efforts to civilize the Sioux was the fondness of the Indians for war with their neighbors. The conflict with the Chippewas abated only briefly after the spectacular bloodshed in 1839, but the possible withholding of annuities provided the government officials with a new weapon. Still, nonannuity bands kept up the fight during the forties. Peace was made with the Sacs and Foxes in 1844, but trouble with the Winnebagos, now living in northeastern Iowa, began about that time and erupted in open attack by some Wahpekutes in 1847. The Sioux played an obstructionist role in the removal of the Winnebagos to central Minnesota in 1848, when Wabasha entertained the migrating tribe and offered them some land near his village. Another source of difficulty came from the invasion of the Sioux hunting grounds by half-breeds from the Red River settlements in Canada, who killed off the bison on which the prairie Sioux depended. Retaliation led in at least one case to the deaths of two innocent white men bringing a drove of cattle from Missouri to Fort Snelling. 50
Despite all these obstacles, Bruce managed the St. Peter's Agency
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49 28th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 377 ; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 1017; Statistical table of Sioux bands, September 1, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR.
50 Bruce to Chambers, August 4, 1843; Chambers to Crawford, August 12, 1843; Bruce to Chambers, April 2, 1844; Chambers to Crawford, April 18, 1844; Bruce to Chambers, June 12, 1844; and July 1, 1845; Bruce to Medill, August 15, 1847; Henry M. Rice to Medill, April 3 and June 25, 1848; Bruce to Chambers, February 18, 1844; Bruce to Harvey, July 26, 1847; Bruce to Medill, August 12, 1847; Medill to Harvey, September 4 and 6, 1847; Chambers to Crawford, September 3, 1844; Bruce to Chambers, October 2 and November 2, 1844; ibid.; Russell Blakeley, "History of the Discovery of the Mississippi River and the Advent of Commerce in Minnesota," Minnesota Historical Collections, VIII ( 1895-1898), 382 - 385.
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with reasonable success during his term of office. He weathered several attempts to have him removed, first by a Methodist missionary who accused him of being a "profane, dram-drinking agent" and of favoring the Catholics, and later by the independent traders and citizens allied with them, who charged him with favoring the licensed traders. 51 But in 1848 the agency was reduced to a subagency, as an economy move, and Robert G. Murphy became subagent. During Murphy's brief term of office--he was removed in favor of Nathaniel McLean, publisher of a Whig newspaper in St. Paul, in 1849--his chief accomplishment was reducing the amount of drunkenness among the Indians by the unlikely but apparently partially effective device of a temperance pledge. 52
Momentous events were occurring in the land of the Sioux during the later 1840's. Minnesota Territory was created in the spring of 1849 and Alexander Ramsey of Pennsylvania appointed governor. In executing his function as ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs, a responsibility which he took with much seriousness, Ramsey made his first report to the commissioner a veritable compendium of historical and ethnological information on the Indians of the territory. 53
As if to demonstrate beyond all question that civilization was moving in on the Santee Sioux, in April, 1849, a young lawyer named James
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51 Bruce to Crawford, June 14, 1842; Sibley to Crawford, October 31, 1842; Abstract of charges against Bruce, December 6, 1842; B. T. Kavanaugh to Charles A. Wickliffe, April 14, 1842; Petition of Sioux, prepared by H. Jackson, to President John Tyler [no date, but postmarked October 10, 1844]; Crawford to Secretary of War William Wilkins, October 31, 1844; Bruce to Crawford, February 7, 1845; Settlers' petition, n.d., accompanied by affidavits from Scott Campbell, April 9, 1846, and William Evans, April 9, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR. Kavanaugh lived to regret his accusations against Bruce, for they elicited a countercharge from the trader Henry Hastings Sibley and other men, who offered sworn testimony that Kavanaugh had been guilty of voyeurism in drilling holes through the partition separating his stateroom from that occupied by the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Steele on the steamboat Amaranth. Kavanaugh left the mission that fall and later underwent an investigation by the officials of his church. Scott Campbell's testimony was evidently related to a grudge he bore Bruce, who had dismissed him for intemperance in the spring of 1843. The settler's petition, which his affidavit supported, charged Bruce with refusing to honor claims of private citizens against the government for damages done by the Indians, while paying those of the American Fur Company without question. Henry Jackson, one of the independent traders, was the first signer of this petition.
52 Medill to Robert G. Murphy, May 6, 1848, and Medill to Bruce, May 6, 1848, NARS, RG 75, LS; Secretary of the Interior to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 6,1849, NARS, RG 75, LR; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 1049-1050; Minnesota Pioneer ( St. Paul), August 23, 1849. The agent's salary was $1,500, a subagent's, $750.
53 His report is contained in 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, pp. 1005-1117.
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Madison Goodhue arrived in St. Paul with a printing press and proceeded to start the first newspaper in the territory, the Minnesota Pioneer. Goodhue was a highly articulate man, and, unlike some frontier editors, he entered upon his task with no strong prejudices against Indians. Goodhue's detailed account of the annuity payment in September, 1849, is the first by an observer sufficiently detached to be conscious of the color and pageantry of the ceremony. On the Saturday preceding the payment the Indians from Wacouta's and Wabasha's bands "came up the river with their hundred canoes, the paddles sparkling in the sunshine, and moored their multitudinous fleet to the island [below St. Paul], and fastened their bows to the beach." In ten minutes they had their canoes unloaded and were cutting and trimming willow poles for their tipis. In two or three hours they had more than forty erected, "and in the warm sunshine of an Indian summer day, the picture resting upon a rich back-ground of forest-trees now turning yellow, was really delightful." Sunday evening they left their encampment and embarked for the fort. Goodhue described the scene there with all the eye for detail of Parkman or Catlin:
The Indians are seen straggling along the road--the males, with bows and arrows, pipes and guns--the females, laboring under huge packs of luggage slung by a strap across the forehead. Upon the ground about the Agency at Fort Snelling, while awaiting their turns for the hard handful of silver dollars, they are seen in every posture--some reclining in their tents (or lodges)--some a sitting on a rail--some stretched on their bellies and lazily picking at the ground with their toes--some smoking, and inducing a fuddle by fuming the smoke through the nose--some sauntering in squads of two or more, about the grounds, with the arms in school-boy fashion, about each other's necks--some outside the enclosure, running between two long rows of Indian spectators for a prize--and others of the dignitaries, seated by themselves, talking over the affairs of the invincible Sioux nation.
Inside the agency, four or five government officials with payrolls sat at a table and called the payees up one by one. As his name was called, each person or his sponsor stepped up, touched the secretary's pen, and reached for the money, which was usually deposited "by the hand of a white friend, in the box of his band." 54
These, then, were the Sioux in 1849, still clinging to what remained of their traditional way of life in the face of vast changes taking place about them and threatening soon to disrupt that way of life and shatter it beyond all hope of recovery.
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54 Minnesota Pioneer, September 27, 1849.
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CHAPTER 4
The Monstrous Conspiracy
FROM COLONIAL TIMES the pattern of Indian-white relationships in this country was characterized by a steady and increasing white pressure on the lands claimed by the Indians. The pressure became especially intense after the Revolution, when settlers poured across the Appalachians. Between 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville was forced on a dozen tribes after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and 1817 and 1818, when cessions having at least the coloration of Indian consent were made, the Indians ceded most of their lands in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. After Jackson's Indian removal bill in 1830, the small tracts reserved at the time of those treaties were also surrendered and the Indians obliged to emigrate across the Mississippi. 1 The Sioux were not subjected to this kind of pressure until comparatively late, the small cession made in 1830 having been of slight importance and that made in 1837 involving lands no longer extensively used by them. 2 Sooner or later, however, the advancing frontier was certain to reach the upper Mississippi valley.
Oddly enough, the first major land cession negotiated with the Santee Sioux was not an attempt to open territory to white settlement but
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1 Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 18, 32-34, and passim.
2 One village, Kapozha, was located on the cast bank of the Mississippi and had to move across the river after the treaty of 1837.
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rather part of an idealistic scheme to create a northern Indian territory to be occupied by the tribes expelled from the Old Northwest. The chief advocate of this scheme was Secretary of War John Bell, who, as chairman of the House Indian Affairs Committee, had studied the Indian problem and had become convinced that such a territory would offer the best solution to the problem created by the emigration of the eastern tribes. By a liberal construction of a provision in the Indian appropriations act passed March 3, 1841, Bell undertook to negotiate with the Sioux for the cession of a portion of their lands sufficient to accommodate the emigrating tribes. To conduct the negotiations he selected Governor Doty of Wisconsin Territory, who had accompanied Schoolcraft in 1820 and was somewhat familiar with the region desired and with its native inhabitants. 3
In company with several traders whose services he regarded as essential, Doty arrived at Traverse des Sioux about mid-summer and met with the chiefs and braves of the Sissetons, Wahpetons, and Wahpekutes. He seems to have encountered remarkably little opposition to his proposal. Either the Indians did not understand what they were agreeing to, or else the traders had done a good job of softening them up for the kill. As a result, Doty not only made the desired treaty but exceeded his instructions as to the area of the cession. Bell had expected to buy not more than five million acres, but Doty found it expedient to purchase six times this area, for which the government was to pay $1,300,000. 4
Doty's treaty is an interesting document, a strange mixture of the utopian and the practical. The tract ceded was a rough parallelogram, west of the territory claimed by the Mdewakantons and east of the crest of the Coteau des Prairies. Everything south of roughly the fortysixth parallel and north of the present Minnesota-Iowa line was to be incorporated into an Indian territory, within which the Indians were to be encouraged to become farmers and, eventually, citizens. Specific tracts on the left bank of the Minnesota River were set apart for the various bands of Sioux who were parties to the treaty. Each of them was to be provided with an agent, a school, a blacksmith, a gristmill and

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3 Alice Elizabeth Smith, James Duane Doty: Frontier Promoter ( Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1954), pp. 257-258; U. S. Statutes at Large, V, 419.
4 James D. Doty to Secretary of War John Bell, August 4, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR. The treaty of July 31, 1841, may be found in Thomas Hughes, Old Traverse des Sioux ( St. Peter: Herald Publishing Co., 1929), pp. 166-170. Three copies, in different hands, are to be found accompanying Doty's letter of transmittal ( August 4, 1841). The treaty in Hughes is based on these.
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sawmill (where water power was available), and other appurtenances of civilization. The whole was to be under the supervision of a governor or superintendent whose headquarters were to be at the mouth of the Blue Earth River. One of the innovations of Doty's plan was that it provided for more direct control of the Indian trade by the government. The traders became, in effect, government appointees, and the governor had the power to fix prices and otherwise regulate trade. 5
The traders' services in making this treaty possible were recognized by a provision allowing up to $150,000 for the payment of claims against the Indians by them and by white settlers. Furthermore, Doty seems to have promised jobs to virtually every trader operating in the Sioux country. Nine of them were to be appointed traders at the various settlements, three more were to be appointed agents, another was to be superintendent of agriculture at Traverse des Sioux, and Henry H. Sibley was to be placed in charge of the whole enterprise. 6 Upon what authority Doty presumed to dispense promises of jobs so liberally is not clear, but he seems to have operated on the principle that the best way to solve the problem of the traders' influence over the Indians was to acknowledge it and accept it.
The date of the principal treaty was July 31, 1841. On August 11, at Mendota, Doty negotiated a supplementary treaty with five of the seven Mdewakanton bands, by the terms of which they ceded all their lands and agreed to move to the left bank of the Minnesota. They agreed to the relevant clauses of the earlier treaty and to provisions substituted for the others. The cession was estimated at about two million acres. 7 The two lower bands (Red Wing and Wabasha) refused to sell. Agent Bruce recommended that, if they did not change their minds about selling, they should be removed to a point on the river "Embaratz" (the Zumbro) about thirty miles south of the Red Wing village; this would have been south and southwest of the present town of Pine Island, a favorite hunting ground of the Red Wing band. 8
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5 Doty to Bell, August 9, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR.
6 Ibid.
7 Doty to Bell, August 14, 1841; and " Articles of a Treaty made and concluded at Mindota [sic] . . . between James Duane Doty . . . and the Minda Waukanto Bands of the Dakota Nation," ibid.
8 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Doc. I, p. 355. Doty fails to mention the refusal of these two bands to sell in his correspondence with the Secretary of War, and the treaty as found in RG 75 includes no signatures. Still a third treaty was made with the halfbreeds for the relinquishment for $200,000 of a reserve on Lake Pepin provided by the
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Although the Indians neglected their hunting and farming in the expectation of receiving large annuities and were in "deplorable" condition by the fall of 1842, the Doty treaties were destined never to be ratified by the Senate and the grandiose plan for an Indian territory never to reach fruition. Besides opposition from former agent Taliaferro, who denounced it as a plot by the traders to gain complete control over the Indians, it ran into more formidable resistance from the Senate on quite other grounds, notably from the expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Cutting through the maze of stated legalistic objections, it is evident that Benton's real reason for opposing the treaty was that it would have locked up a valuable tract of country for the Indians instead of opening it to white settlement. The political motives that may have contributed to the defeat of the Doty treaties need not detain us here. Presented to the Senate at the very end of the session, the first treaty was tabled on September 13, 1841, resubmitted the next spring, and finally rejected on August 29, 1842. 9
The idea of a cession of the lands claimed by the Sioux in Minnesota was allowed to rest through most of the decade of the forties, and Indian Bureau officials behaved as though they expected the Sioux to stay where they were for all time. The proposal was revived, however, shortly after Minnesota became a territory in 1849. Almost as soon as he had taken office as governor, Alexander Ramsey began urging his superiors to capitalize on what he represented as the Indians' eagerness to sell their lands. His suggestion met a favorable reception from Indian Commissioner Orlando Brown and from Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, to whose charge Indian affairs had been transferred with the creation that year of the new Department of the Interior. In a twenty-one-page letter Brown set forth detailed instructions for
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treaty of 1830 but never occupied. See Doty to Bell, September 19, 1841, and Doty to Secretary of War John C. Spencer, November 9, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR.
9 Lawrence Taliaferro to Bell, September 10, 1841, and Thomas Hart Benton to the President [ John Tyler], September 14, 1841, ibid.; Smith, James Duane Doty, pp. 260262. Calling the treaty the "most unjustifiable and reprehensible thing of the kind that ever came before the Senate," Benton argued that, in proposing to set up a government for the Indian territory, it constituted an attempt by the executive branch to arrogate to itself functions properly the prerogative of the legislative branch. Some of the missionaries looked favorably on the Doty treaties. Stephen R. Riggs, who was with Doty at Traverse des Sioux, wrote Samuel W. Pond: "I am pleased at the Gov. views about civilizing them [the Indians]. They are comprehensive and enlightened. The experiment must show whether they are practicable under present circumstances." See Riggs to Pond, July 29, 1841, in Pond papers, Minnesota Historical Society.
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negotiations to be held at the fall annuity payment. All lands claimed by the Sioux north of the Iowa line were to be acquired--more if possible; the region south of the Minnesota River should be the absolute minimum accepted. The price paid should be determined by the value of the land to the Indians (not much, thought Brown), not by its value to potential white immigrants. Two or two and a half cents per acre would surely be ample, although the commissioners were authorized to go above this if they thought the President and the Senate would agree. 10
The attempt to negotiate with the Sioux in the fall of 1849 was a dismal failure. Many of the western Indians had left on their annual buffalo hunt, and the Mdewakantons were unwilling to treat so late in the season "and for other reasons," as Ramsey cryptically expressed it. Their chief reason probably was that they did not wish to share their annuities under the 1837 treaty with the other bands, as Brown's instructions had specified. They evaded the proposal for a cession and spent their time complaining of various grievances, notably the disposition of the education fund. They demanded that their grievances be redressed before they would discuss any cessions, and they urged the other bands not to come to the negotiations. 11
This abortive attempt to make a treaty had one benefit: it taught Ramsey something about Indians. He undoubtedly learned a good deal also by talking to his friend Henry H. Sibley, who had traded with them for nearly fifteen years. In December, 1849, the two men addressed a letter to Commissioner Brown, in which they urged a more realistic approach to the matter of obtaining the desired cession. In the first place, the Indians would not sell unless they had the assurance that they would be permanently located on some portion of the proposed cession. Ramsey suggested that they be allowed to remain on the lands north of the Minnesota, above the Little Rapids, and that they be further permitted to hunt anywhere on the cession not occupied by whites until the President might direct otherwise. Furthermore, the Indians objected to a limited annuity on the grounds that its expiration would work a hardship on them. A better method, thought Ramsey and Sibley, was to give them a fixed sum for twenty years, then reduce it if their numbers had diminished, and continue the practice "until the
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10 Alexander Ramsey to William Medill, June 19, 1849; James Ewing to Orlando Brown, July 16, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency; Brown to Ramsey, July 14, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LS; Brown to Ramsey and Governor John Chambers, August 25, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LR.
11 Ramsey to Brown, September 18, October 4, and December 10, 1849; Chambers and Ramsey to Ewing, October 18, 1849, ibid.
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bands should become extinct." Another difficulty was that the Doty treaties had made the Indians aware of the value placed on their lands by the whites. Hence there was no hope of buying the land for less than ten cents an acre. Buying twenty or twenty-five million acres at this price and deducting the traders' debts would leave a sum sufficient to give each Indian fifteen or sixteen dollars annually at an interest rate of five per cent. Liberality, the two men urged, was the true policy to follow. 12
After the failure of negotiations in 1849, it was assumed that another attempt would be made the following year. Although Ramsey was advised early in September, 1850, to hold his Indians in readiness for forty days after the passage of the Indian appropriations act, no further instructions came, and the only result was that the Indians missed out on their fall hunt. In 1851, however, the government at last meant business. To assist Ramsey in making the desired treaty, no less a personage than the new commissioner of Indian affairs, Luke Lea, was detached from his duties in Washington and sent to the remote upper Mississippi valley. The instructions the two men received from Secretary of Interior A. H. H. Stuart were similar to those sent to Ramsey two years earlier, with two important exceptions. They were permitted to pay up to ten cents an acre for the lands; and if they thought it proper for the Indians to be allowed to remain on some part of the cession "during the pleasure of the President," they were authorized to include such a provision in the treaty, provided the locations were as remote as possible from the nearest white settlements. 13 The earlier instructions had expressly forbidden such reservations.
Many observers have noted the moral obliquity that seemingly afflicted white men in their dealings with Indians. Men justly respected for integrity and fairness in their relations with other white men saw nothing reprehensible about resorting to all manner of chicanery and equivocation when dealing with Indians. Starting from the axiom that the Indians were mere children and had a less enlightened view of what would serve their own best interests than the Great Father and his representatives did, government officials, especially treaty commissioners, felt themselves under no restraints in deceiving or bullying the Indians into acceptance of terms decided upon by higher authority.
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12 Ramsey and Henry H. Sibley to Brown, December 10, 1849, ibid.
13 Acting Commissioner A. L. Loughery to Ramsey, September 5, 1850, NARS, RG 75, LS; Ramsey to Commissioner Luke Lea, December 21, 1850; Secretary of Interior A. H. H. Stuart to Lea and Ramsey, May 16, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR; U.S. Statutes at Large, IX, 556.
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They knew--or thought they knew--what was best for the Indians, and the end justified the means. By a remarkable coincidence, what was deemed best for the Indians was invariably also to the advantage of the government, the traders, and, above all, the land-hungry settlers.
If one were seeking a treaty tailor-made to illustrate this phenomenon, he could not do better than to examine the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, negotiated with the Sioux in the summer of 1851. All the standard techniques were employed by the commissioners. The carrot and the stick--and at least once the mailed fist--were alternately displayed, as the occasion seemed to demand. If the Indians asked for time to consider the terms offered them, they were chided for behaving like women and children rather than men. If they asked shrewd, businesslike questions, the commissioners uttered cries of injured innocence: surely the Indians did not think the Great Father would deceive them! If they wanted certain provisions changed, they were told that it was too late; the treaty had already been written down. The Indians were flattered and brow-beaten by turns, wheedled and shamed, promised and threatened, praised for their wisdom and ridiculed for their folly. In such fashion was their " free consent" obtained.
Like Doty in 1841, Ramsey and Lea determined to treat first with the less sophisticated upper Sioux--the non-annuity bands--so that if they signed a treaty, the commissioners could present the lower bands with a fait accompli that would virtually force the Mdewakantons to follow their example. The Wahpekutes were permitted, at their own request, to meet the commissioners in company with the Mdewakantons. When Ramsey and Lea arrived at Traverse des Sioux late in June, they found few Indians on hand but plenty of traders and other hangerson. Few treaties before or afterward were so thoroughly covered for the benefit of the general public. Two artists were present to memorialize the event on canvas, and the press was ably represented by editor Goodhue of the Pioneer, whose running journal furnishes the most detailed account of the proceedings.
After three weeks of waiting around for the remote bands to appear, during which time the Indians present lived well on beef, pork, and bread, the negotiations finally got under way July 18 in an outdoor arbor on a terrace well back from the river. In all the speeches by the commissioners, stress was laid on the Indians' desire to sell their lands, a wish which the government was represented as being willing to humor. Having heard that the game had nearly all disappeared "and that hunger and starvation, like wolves, were often in their lodges," the
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President had decided to send the commissioner himself in order to guarantee that the Indians' wishes would be met. Naturally, he denied that the government had any desire to take advantage of them in any way. Since the Indians had much land, which they were unable to use, and the Great Father had money and goods, an exchange seemed perfectly logical. Lea pointed out that other tribes had sold their lands and were now "happier and more comfortable, and every year growing better and richer." His hearers had no way of verifying this assertion, but the modern reader, who can consult Grant Foreman The Last Trek of the Indians for the details of the misery and starvation among the eastern Indians forced to emigrate, is in a better position to judge its accuracy. 14
After Lea had outlined the benefits to be received under the terms of the proposed treaty, he invited comments from the Indians. This proved a tactical error in that it led to an incipient mutiny which had to be quelled by a threat of stopping the issue of rations. The commissioners did, however, honor the reasonable request that the treaty provisions as outlined by Lea be put in writing so that the Indians could consider them at length, and several amendments proposed by the Indians after a day's deliberation were incorporated into the final document. 15
On July 23 the commissioners ordered blankets, knives, tobacco, ribbons, paint, and other articles piled up in tempting array, just in case there should be any inclination on the part of the Indians to back out at this late hour. At 1:40 that afternoon the commissioners took their places and were followed shortly by the Indians. The pipe passed among the parties to the negotiation, and then the treaty was read in English and translated into Dakota by Stephen R. Riggs. Soon the signing by the Indians began. Sleepy Eyes threatened to disrupt the harmony of the ceremony by some largely irrelevant objections, and another Sisseton requested that the treaty not be changed in Washington. Upon Lea's assurance that "everything we promise will be faithfully performed," the signing went forward. The Indian who had earlier asked that the treaty be written down now took occasion to point out to the
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14 William G. Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852 ( St. Paul: W. G. Le Duc, 1852), pp. 31, 37-38, 52-54. This is a reprint of a day-by-day account of the treaty negotiations, published in the Minnesota Pioneer from July 3 through August 14, 1851. Folwell attributes the authorship to James M. Goodhue, editor of the Pioneer. See also Lucile M. Kane , "The Sioux Treaties and the Traders," Minnesota History, XXXII ( June 1951), 65-80.
15 Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852, pp. 55-60.
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white men that "you think it a great deal of money to give for this land, but you must well understand that the money will all go back to the whites again, and the country will also remain theirs." When the treaty had been signed by everyone concerned, Lea asked the Indians "to be as honest and faithful in its observance as the government will be upon their part." As matters turned out, meeting this obligation would not have demanded any great degree of honesty or faithfulness. The ceremony completed, Goodhue commented: "Thus ended the sale of twenty one millions of acres of the finest land in the world." 16
The treaty of Traverse des Sioux provided for the cession by the upper Sioux of all their claims in what is today Minnesota and a small portion of South Dakota. For this cession they were to receive $1,665,000, divided as follows: $275,000 was to go to the chiefs to enable them to "settle their affairs" (i.e., pay their debts to the traders), pay the costs of removal, and subsist themselves and their people for one year; $30,000 was to be spent to establish schools, blacksmith shops, and mills, and to open farms on the new reservation. The remainder of the principal ($1,360,000) was to bear interest at a rate of five per cent for a period of fifty years. This interest was to be used for the benefit of the Indians, who would receive a $40,000 cash annuity and $10,000 worth of goods and provisions annually; $12,000 was to be spent for general agricultural and civilization purposes, and $6,000 was to be used for education. An important article, later stricken out by the Senate, provided for a reservation on the upper Minnesota, extending for ten miles on either side of the river and from the western end of the cession down to the Yellow Medicine River. 17
Although treaty stipulations providing for direct payments for traders' debts had been outlawed by Congress, a way was found to evade the letter of the law at Traverse des Sioux. Each Indian, as he stepped away from the treaty table, was pulled to a barrel nearby and made to sign a document prepared by the traders. By its terms the signatories to the treaty acknowledged their debts to the traders and half-breeds and pledged themselves, as the representatives of their respective bands, to pay those obligations. No schedule of the sums owed was attached to the document, but after the ceremony was over the traders got together and scaled down their claims (originally estimated at $431,735.78) to the round sum of $210,000; the half-breeds were to get $40,000. The
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16 Ibid., pp. 64-468.
17 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 588-589.
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Indians later claimed that they had thought they were signing a third copy of the treaty, as did Thomas S. Williamson. The traders and some others insisted, however, that the whole matter had been discussed privately beforehand and that the Indians knew perfectly well what they were signing. The testimony later taken is voluminous and contradictory, but one thing is certain: the "traders' paper" and the manner in which the Indians were induced to sign it did more than any other single action on the part of the white men present at the treaty to engender bitterness among the Indians afterward. 18
A few days after the signing of the treaty of Traverse des Sioux with the upper bands, a similar agreement was made at Mendota with the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes. Because the first treaty was the more spectacular and because it made the second almost inevitable and a trifle anticlimactic, historians have tended to give it their almost exclusive attention and to dismiss the treaty of Mendota with a few words. This approach calls for correction, for the second treaty is more important than its surface appearance may suggest. It was at Mendota, among Indians who had made treaties before, that the commissioners were really put on their mettle and where the treaty-making techniques were most baldly displayed in all their ruthlessness. It was here that the hard questions were asked--and answered with equivocation and bullying.
"Once more unto the beef, dear friends, once more," wrote Goodhue as the council got under way in the upper room of a large warehouse. Ramsey opened the negotiations on the afternoon of July 29 with much the same speech he had delivered eleven days earlier, but with the additional remark that, since the upper Sioux had already sold their lands, there was really nothing for the lower bands to do but follow suit. Because these people, unlike most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons, would have to leave their homes, Lea made perfunctory obeisance to the natural love of one's homeland and added that he himself had moved several times. When the treaty terms had been outlined and a tract on the upper Minnesota below that reserved for the upper bands had been suggested as a reservation, he commented that there probably would be no remarks but that if there were he would entertain them. Wabasha injected a sour note into the council at once by asking that the Mdewakantons be paid the education fund that had so long been a source of ill feeling with them. And a Wahpekute warrior asked about
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18 William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, I ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1956), 282-283.
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the government's announced plans to pay his band for the killing of seventeen of their men by the Sacs and Foxes two years earlier. The commissioners parried both of these inquiries and then adjourned the council. 19
When they met again the next day, it was, at Wabasha's request, outdoors, on a high plain near Pilot Knob, overlooking the landing at Mendota and within sight of Fort Snelling. The chiefs, harder bargainers than their Sisseton and Wahpeton counterparts, refused to commit themselves on the proposed treaty, and the council had to be adjourned again without action. When it reconvened on July 31, Little Crow brought the discussion back to the question of the unpaid annuities. Lea tried to evade the issue, but Ramsey gave as straightforward an answer as any the Indians were likely to get: "If this treaty can be arranged, so that we can be justified in paying you this money," he said, "as much of it will be paid down to you as will be equal to your usual cash annuities for three years." The chiefs seemed to assent, and Ramsey thought that work on the treaty might as well go ahead. Little Crow was not ready yet, however; "We will talk of nothing else but that money, if it is until next spring," he said. Ramsey's reply that the money would be paid when the treaty was finished seemed not to satisfy the Indians, for they remained silent when Lea tried to return to the discussion of the treaty. Trying a different tack, the commissioners abruptly terminated the session and left. 20
The next day the Indians assembled and asked the commissioners to join them, but the discussions that followed were fruitless. Evidently a break was in order, to give everyone time to think matters over and come back with something concrete. So, despite the long wait at Traverse des Sioux, the commissioners allowed three days to pass without any formal negotiations. Then, on August 5, the council reassembled for what proved to be the decisive session. After the treaty had been read in English and translated by Gideon Pond, Little Crow was invited to sign. He made no move to do so. Then Wabasha arose and questioned the whole argument that the treaty would be for the Indians' benefit; the provisions in the earlier treaty for schools, farmers, etc., had been of no benefit to them, and he thought a straight cash payment would be preferable. Furthermore, he objected to the prairie country which had been selected as their future home; he had always lived near the woods and preferred that type of country. At this point Lea bared the mailed fist that always lay thinly concealed behind his
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19 Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852, pp. 70-75.
20 Ibid., pp. 75-78.
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words. Addressing Wabasha and the other chiefs, he said: "Suppose your Great Father wanted your lands and did not want a treaty for your good, he could come with 100,000 men and drive you off to the Rocky Mountains." The matter had been thoroughly thought over, a treaty had been prepared and signed by the commissioners, and it was too late to talk of changing it. But even this bald threat did not produce the desired result, for when Ramsey again called for signers, no one offered to be the first. 21
Objections continued to be voiced. After the commissioners had evaded some and made slight concessions in response to others, Wacouta spoke up to express a well-founded fear: Would the treaty be changed when it got to Washington? "If all prove true as you say, it will be very good indeed. But," he continued, "when we were at Washington [in 1837], the chiefs were told many things; which when we came back here, and attempted to carry out, we found could not be done. At the end of three or four years, the Indians found out very different from what they had been told, and all were ashamed." He also asked for a reservation south of his village, "a tract of land called Pine Island, which is a good place for Indians." The high regard in which Wacouta was held inhibited Ramsey from ridiculing him as he had the earlier chiefs, but he pointed out that it would be impossible to satisfy everyone with a single treaty. As a partial concession, he promised that the Indians could go on hunting in their old homes for many years, until the country filled up with settlers. 22
Still the objections went on, Wabasha and Little Crow leading the attack. Ramsey seemed hurt by the implications of some of the Indians' remarks. The chiefs made the commissioners ashamed, he said: "They seem to think we have come here as the representatives of the Great Father to cheat them." The carrot having been ineffectual, the stick was now brought into play once more, as Lea obliquely threatened to cut off rations, saying, "No man puts any food in his mouth by long talk; but may often get hungry at it. Let the Little Crow and the chiefs step forward and sign." This peremptory demand had the desired effect, for Little Crow stepped up and wrote his name, Taoyateduta, and the other chiefs made their X's, until all sixty-four had signed.23 On that hill overlooking the meeting point of the two rivers, the lower Sioux had signed away their patrimony.
The treaty of Mendota contained essentially the same terms as the
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21 Ibid., pp. 79-82.
22 Ibid., pp. 82-85.
23 Ibid., pp. 85-86.
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earlier one, with the exception of a smaller payment ($1,410,000), a provision that in the future the entire annuity under the 1837 treaty would be paid in cash, and different specifications for the reservation. The article concerning the reservation, like that in the other treaty, was stricken out by the Senate. In order to gain the assent of the Wahpekutes, a clause was included providing for their participation in benefits derived from the 1837 treaty. Like the treaty of Traverse des Sioux, this agreement provided that the principal sum, on which interest was to be paid for fifty years, should not revert to the Indians upon the expiration of that time. 24
As soon as the treaties had been signed, whites began pouring onto the ceded lands. Within two weeks of the end of negotiations at Mendota, they were reported to be crossing the Mississippi"in troops," making claims, and building shanties on lands which they as yet had no legal right to intrude upon. Most were said to be speculators rather than prospective settlers. Agent McLean protested to his superiors, but he recognized that it would be useless to appeal to the local civil authorities for redress, since they were in sympathy with the intruders. He applied to the commandant at Fort Snelling but was told that the garrison could do nothing about the situation. 25 Expecting the treaties to be ratified shortly, Ramsey was disposed to allow this invasion to take place, having heard, he said, that the government had elsewhere adopted the practice of tacitly indulging "her citizens in entering upon Indian lands, in the period between a treaty, and its ratification by the Senate." His only fear was that there might be a clash between the intruders and the Indians, but thus far the latter had shown remarkable forbearance. Their patience was sorely tried, however, when settlers began laying out farms on the Indians' fields and hay ground and ordering the Indians off. 26
In one sense the presence of these hordes of white settlers was fortunate for the Indians during the winter of 1851-1852. Having missed out on their summer hunt and having lost most of their corn to floods, living in momentary expectation of receiving payments under the new treaties, the Indians were destitute and in a starving condition much of the winter and spring. The settlers, motivated no doubt by considera-
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24 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 591-593.
25 Nathaniel McLean to Lea, August 19, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR.
26 Ramsey to Lea, January 28, 1852, ibid.; 32nd Cong., 2nd Sess., Ex. Doc. 1, p. 354. This last imposition was inflicted between the time of the ratification of the treaties and their proclamation by the President.
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tions of safety, since many of the Indians were armed, contributed heavily to their support and, in the opinion of contemporary observers, saved them from mass starvation. 27
The only solution, as the whites saw it, was the swift ratification of the treaties. Goodhue warned that unless the treaties were ratified, the Indians would lose their lands without compensation, and there would be an Indian war. As a matter of fact, the treaties did not even reach the Senate until February 13--more than six months after they had been concluded--and then no sense of urgency animated the men whose task it was to ratify them. Despite opposition from southern senators who had no wish to see another northern state enter the Union in a few years, the treaties were finally ratified, with bare two-thirds majorities, on June 23, 1852, with amendments striking out the provisions for reservations and thus leaving the Indians without a home. 28 In the general rejoicing over the passage of the treaties, the white people of Minnesota seemed to regard the amendments as of little moment. The Pioneer commented that the Indians were losing nothing "of any positive value to them." Many probably assumed that the assent of the Indians to the changes would not be necessary, but Congress included in the Indian appropriations bill, passed August 30, a proviso that none of the $690,050 appropriated to carry out the treaty terms could be expended until the Indians had agreed to the amendments. 29 This proviso looks suspiciously like a last-ditch effort to defeat the treaties, but it could also be interpreted as an honest attempt to deal justly with the Indians.
Obtaining their consent proved by no means easy. When Ramsey met with the chiefs late in August and explained the amendments to them, they refused peremptorily to give their assent unless they could be assured of the location of their future reservation. He was extricated from the awkward position in which he found himself by virtue of a vaguely
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27 McLean to Lea, August 19, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR; Minnesota Pioneer, August 14, 1851, March 4 and April 1, 1852. Only the Mdewakantons had received any annuities the previous summer, and the $30,000 turned over to them after the treaty at Mendota was spent almost at once. By the spring of 1852 the Indians were said to have eaten their ponies, "and when that was all gone, [had] literally gnawed the bark off of the trees."
28 Minnesota Pioneer, April 1, May 6, and July 1, 1852; Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 290-291; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 593. In theory they had a home outside the limits of the cession, but no such location had been chosen, and they had been led to expect a reservation within the cession.
29 Minnesota Pioneer, July 15, 1852; U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 52.
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worded letter to Lea from the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, who said that the amendments authorized the President to allow the Indians to remain on a portion of their lands until the whites wanted it. With this slender assurance, Ramsey gave the chiefs a halfpromise which was probably converted into a guarantee in the process of translation, and they finally consented to the amendments. 30
One further hurdle remained to be surmounted: the traders and half-breeds had to be paid off. Theoretically, Ramsey could simply have paid them the sums specified in the traders' paper out of the $690,050 he was authorized to disburse. He believed, however, that legal evidence in the form of witnessed receipts signed by the chiefs and headmen was called for. Early in November he undertook this delicate task. Since the Wahpekutes had signed a traders' paper at Mendota and had not repudiated it, they presented no problem. The Mdewakantons were not so docile. Once more the carrot and the stick had to be used. The stick in this case was a delay in the payment of the annuities due under the 1837 treaty, as well as of the current annuity--a highly effective weapon with Indians who had been hovering on the brink of starvation much of the previous year. The carrot consisted of dividing a sum of $20,000 equally among the seven chiefs, ostensibly to be paid to certain half-breeds who had not benefited from the treaty. There was a fine cloak-and-dagger scene late on the night of November 8, when Wabasha and Wacouta were presented with bags of gold and promptly signed a receipt for the entire $90,000 supposedly due the traders and a statement authorizing Ramsey to pay the remaining $70,000. The other chiefs followed their example the next day, and on the eleventh each signed a voucher for $2,857.14 2/7. 31
The upper Sioux, who had protested as soon as they learned the nature of the traders' paper they had signed, also proved refractory and had to be reduced to submission by the withholding of their annuities and by the arrest and deposition from his chieftainship of Red Iron, leader of the opposition. It was almost the end of November before Ramsey finally secured the signatures of eleven chiefs and braves of sufficient stature to give the operation the appearance of legality. 32
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30 Ramsey to Lea, August 28, September 4 and 10, 1852; Senator D. R. Atchison to Lea, August 3, 1852, NARS, RG 75, LR; Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 294. The Wahpekutes also objected to the striking out of the clause that would have provided for their participation in the annuities received by the Mdewakantons under the treaty of 1837.
31 Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 284, 297-299.
32 Ibid., I, 299-303. In reply to the complaint about the traders' paper, Ramsey had assured the upper Sioux in December, 1851, that, as the paper was not part of the
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Newton H. Winchell, though no admirer of the Sioux, referred to the treaties of 1851 as a "monstrous conspiracy." 33 They were that and more. From beginning to end--the tactics used to get the Indians to agree to the treaties in the first place, the bad faith of the Senate in amending them, the devices employed to force the Indians to accept the amendments, the whole nefarious business of the traders' paper-it was a thoroughly sordid affair, equal in infamy to anything else in the long history of injustice perpetrated upon the Indians by the authorized representatives of the United States government in the name of that government. Despite all the fine talk during the negotiations about the welfare of the Indians, they seem to have been speedily lost sight of once their X's were down on paper. When the treaties reached the Senate, the Indians became mere pawns in a power struggle between sectional and political factions. Even the subsequent investigation of Ramsey's role in the affair--in which he was whitewashed by the Senate--seems to have been politically motivated and not the product of any real concern for the Indians. 34 When the whirlwind was reaped a decade later, the immediate victims were the comparatively innocent white settlers near the reservation, not the men ultimately responsible. In the end, of course, the ones who suffered most were, as always, the Indians.
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treaty, the commisioners had no power, "and assumed none, in relation to the payment of debts to their traders." See McLean to Lea, December 13, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR. His statement, which the Indians apparently accepted at face value, showed either ignorance of the terms of the paper (as he later testified) or disingenuousness. For a discussion of the role played by one Madison Sweetser in this affair, see Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 299-303.
33 Newton H. Winchell, The Aborigines of Minnesota ( St. Paul: The Pioneer Co., 1911), p. 554.
34 Folwell (in History of Minnesota, I, 462-470) traces the course of the investigation in some detail. His information is derived principally from the voluminous "Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the President of the United States to Investigate the Official Conduct of Alexander H. Ramsey, Late Governor of Minnesota, with the Testimony Taken in the Case by Them, Transmitted to the Senate with the Message of the President of the United States, January 10, 1854," 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 61.
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[mdenney]

CHAPTER 5
Reservation Days
THE TREATIES of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota brought the Santee Sioux within the toils of the reservation system for the first time. They had previously been able to live and hunt pretty much as they pleased in the region they had occupied since their expulsion from the Mille Lacs country. But now, by submitting to the terms of these treaties, they became reservation Indians, subject to the humiliation and demoralization that condition implied in the nineteenth century. The practical impossibility of immediately confining them to the reservation prolonged their freedom for a few years; but as their old lands filled with white settlers and as strenuous efforts were made to keep them on the reservation, they gradually submitted to the dictates of authority.
Properly speaking, the Santees had no reservation under the terms of the 1851 treaties as amended by the Senate. But since the directive to locate them on some tract of land outside the ceded area was never acted upon, they were temporarily assigned to the reservation originally set apart by those treaties. The failure of the government to make any specific provision for them before their removal from their old homes is attributable in part to the confusion attending the changeover from a Whig to a Democratic administration in the spring of 1853 and the preoccupation of the new officials with other concerns. After a few months, however, the question began to be raised as to the exact status of the land assigned to the Indians. People charged with managing their
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affairs wondered about the anomaly of locating them on lands they had sold and from the sale of which they were already receiving payment. Early in 1854 the Secretary of the Interior submitted to President Pierce his recommendation that the Indians be permitted to occupy the reservation as their permanent home "until the President shall consider it proper to remove them." 1 Pierce gave his approval to this oddly phrased recommendation, and there the matter rested.
Some members of Congress must have recognized the paradox of a permanent home from which the residents might at any time be evicted, for the Indian appropriations act of July 31, 1854, contained a provision that "the President be authorized to confirm to the Sioux of Minnesota, forever, the reserve on the Minnesota River" then occupied by them, "upon such conditions as he may deem just." 2 No executive action was ever taken in line with this authorization, however, and the status of the lands occupied by the Indians remained uncertain until 1860, when, as will be seen, the Senate belatedly confirmed the Indian title to them. 3
Although the treaties had been negotiated by the Whig governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey, neither he nor the Whig appointee to the post of agent, Nathaniel McLean, had any part in the actual removal of the Indians to their new reservation. The treaties were not formally proclaimed until February 24, 1853; and before anything could be accomplished toward removing the Indians and establishing the agency, both men were out of office, together with the Indian commissioner, Luke Lea. Although the new Democratic governor, Willis A. Gorman, had no special qualifications for the job of superintendent of Indian affairs, the agent who replaced McLean, Robert G. Murphy, was better qualified, having held the post briefly in 1848-1849. And the new commissioner, George Manypenny, though sometimes wrongheaded, was an able man who took his responsibilities more seriously than did most holders of the office in the nineteenth century.
Overruling McLean's earlier plan, Murphy decided to locate the new agency at a fairly well timbered site on the south side of the Minnesota River, about fifteen miles above Fort Ridgely, a military post
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1 Governor Willis A. Gorman to Commissioner George Manypenny, September 13, 1853; Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland to Manypenny, April 13, 1854, NARS, RG 75, LR.
2 U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 326, 331.
3 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 780-789.
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then being built. His ambitious plans for breaking land, erecting buildings to house the blacksmiths, farmers, and laborers, and cutting logs for the next season's construction made little progress in 1853, chiefly because he and Gorman had their hands full getting the Indians moved. The superintendent held several councils in the spring, at which the Indians pointed out that, since preparations for their reception on the reservation were incomplete, they would be much better off continuing to plant at their old homes until enough ground had been broken on the reservation for their needs. Gorman, who seems to have regarded their removal as a test of his competence as an administrator, argued with them until they finally agreed to visit the reservation and decide then whether preparations had progressed far enough to warrant their removal that summer. 4
This concession served as an entering wedge to induce a majority of the lower Indians to move that season. The emigration began in August and progressed slowly. By September 10, Gorman had got the two lower bands, who were the most strongly opposed to moving, as far as Little Crow's village, where they rested for a few days. While there the chiefs demanded in council that they be paid the funds accumulated under the 1837 treaty. Gorman offered to disburse $4,000 of the money in a per capita payment when they reached Shakopee's village. He actually paid out only $1,500, and that was taken from the subsistence and removal fund, but it was enough to pry them loose at Shakopee late in October and get them the rest of the way to the new agency. 5
Whatever his methods, Gorman was quite proud of his achievement in removing the Indians. Except for sixty members of Wabasha's band, who had fled to the Red Cedar River, all the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes had been safely brought to the reservation, he boasted, together with those Sissetons and Wahpetons who had resided on the lower Minnesota. 6 Most of them stayed only long enough to receive their annuities, however, and then took flight back to their old hunting grounds, where they spent the winter and, in some cases, the next summer as well. Conflicting accounts make it difficult to determine just what was accomplished in the first year on the reservation. Gorman's official reports
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4 Alexander Ramsey to Luke Lea, February 14, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, July 27, 1853; Robert G. Murphy to Gorman, September 3, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, May 27, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR; Minnesota Pioneer ( St. Paul), June 9, 1853.
5 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 314 ; Gorman to Manypenny, August 23 and 31, September 9, November 15 and 28, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR.
6 Gorman to Manypenny, November 15, 1853, ibid.
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speak glowingly of extensive farming operations on the reservation. "It only requires a little energy to make the most wonderful progress in civilization among the Sioux," he complacently wrote in July, 1854. On the other hand, Moses N. Adams, a missionary at Traverse des Sioux, gave the impression that very little was done to establish the Indians as farmers. His version received partial confirmation from Superintendent of Farming Philander Prescott, who admitted that the Wahpekutes and three of the Mdewakanton bands were roving about the country most of that year, complaining of their treatment. It appears that only a small amount of land had been broken in 1853, and that so badly that it had to be plowed again before it could be planted. 7
The unwillingness of the Indians to settle down on the reservation had been predicted by one who knew them well, Lawrence Taliaferro, who in 1853 had written to Commissioner Manypenny that they had been so deceived by the outgoing administration as to be skeptical of all the government's professed efforts in their behalf. "Never--never deceive an Indian once even," he warned; "if you do, you may expect never to hear the last of your promise." 8 There were also other, more immediate reasons why the Indians refused to stay put on their reservation. The fact is that there was practically nothing to keep them there. Even Agent Murphy himself did not see fit to reside at the agency, but bought a house at Shakopee, where he remained for the rest of his term. He defended his residence there on the ground that, since the Indians spent most of their time off the reserve, he was actually in a better location to attend their wants than he would have been at the agency. Furthermore, since their old traders were still located at such places as Wabasha, Red Wing, and Faribault, the Indians found it cheaper to buy there and transport the goods and provisions to the reservation themselves than to have the traders sell at a higher rate at the agency.
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7 Gorman to Manypenny, July 18, 1854; Moses N. Adams to Manypenny, August 3, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, November 4, 1855, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1854, p. 74. Adams charged that no special effort was made to have the Indians return to the reservation early in the spring of 1854 and that neither Gorman nor Murphy was around at the time they should have begun planting.
8 Lawrence Taliaferro to Manypenny, July 12, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR. Taliaferro continued to make gratuitous offers of advice and services for years after he had resigned his post as agent. In this letter he describes his achievements with the Indians --"deals a little in self-glorification," as the Indian Office clerk noted by way of summarizing the contents of the letter on the back--and announces that if the Indians should prove too refractory for the department, "temporarily I am at the service of my Country."
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In any case, the roads from the settled parts of Minnesota to the reservation were so primitive that supplies could not be brought there in the winter. 9
The Indians did not leave the reservation in the expectation of enjoying an easy life among the white settlers; they were driven by starvation. The annuities were paid so late and in such small amounts in both 1853 and 1854 that the Indians could not live through the winter on what they received; and since there was little game on the reservation, they had no choice but to hunt in the ceded territory. So long as they merely hunted and fished in the woods, they encountered no hostility from the settlers, but those who sought to return to villages that were now becoming towns met with opposition. In the spring of 1854, before the Wacouta band returned from their winter hunt, their bark houses were burned by the white residents of the growing town of Red Wing. The Indians made no hostile overtures when they arrived, but simply located elsewhere and planted their corn as usual. 10 They continued, however, to visit the Red Wing area during the entire reservation period, to the increasing annoyance of the white settlers.
The plowing done in 1854 was not impressive, in either quantity or quality, but some progress was made toward establishing an agency by the construction of eleven buildings, including two storehouses, a blacksmith shop, houses for the farmers and laborers, and boarding and work houses. There were still no houses for the agent, the interpreter, the head farmer, or the chiefs, however, and the single blacksmith was greatly overworked. In the next year twelve log houses were built for the employees and chiefs, a saw mill was raised and placed in readiness, and the frame was erected for a flour mill. More acreage was plowed for each band and for a few families who wished to farm individually. As a matter of fact, by September, 1855, the amount of land broken exceeded the immediate demands of the Indians, and some of it remained unplanted. 11
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10 Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855, NARS, RG 75, LR. History of Goodhue County ( Red Wing: Wood, Alley & Co., 1878), p. 338. This information is contained in an address delivered June 15, 1869, by Dr. W. W. Sweeney, who settled at Red Wing in 1852.
11 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1854, pp. 74-75; 34th Cong., 1st and 2nd Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 378-380, 384-385.
9 Gorman to Manypenny, January 9, 1854 (incorrectly dated 1853); Murphy to Gorman, January 6, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, October 31, 1855; James Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855 (postmarked September 14), ibid.; Minnesota Pioneer, January 5, 1854. Shields, then a member of Congress, owned land near Faribault and took an interest in the welfare of the Indians who drifted into his locality.
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Many of the Indians, especially the upper bands, for whom no plowing had been done, were still off the reservation in 1855, either farming at unauthorized locations or simply roaming around the settlements. Nearly all were dependent on hunting during the winter. They felt, with reason, that the representatives of the government were being grossly unfair in demanding that they stay on the reservation and yet not providing enough food for them to live on there. Possibly if they had made maximum use of the land broken for them, they might have produced enough food to sustain them through the winter, but it is doubtful. 12
The Indians had other complaints as well. From the very beginning, there had been hitches of one sort or another in getting their supplies to them. Ramsey had used so much of the subsistence and removal fund in persuading the Indians to accept the Senate's amendments to the treaties that he had little to turn over to his successor in the spring of 1853. In addition, goods sent up in the fall of 1852 had been detained at La Crosse by the closing of navigation on the Mississippi and did not reach the agent until the next spring. 13 In the summer of 1853 the upper bands neglected their customary summer hunt on the prairies in the expectation of receiving their annuities about July 1, but these were not sent from Washington until October and not distributed until late in November. The next year such annuities as did arrive, late in the fall, were so niggardly that the Indians at first refused to accept the money, saying it was not the amount the government promised them and accusing Murphy of holding back part of what was coming to them. 14
They may have been in error as to the amount of money they were entitled to, but if so they were to be pardoned. The officials responsible for keeping the accounts in order confessed themselves unclear about the amounts owed under the various treaties. The frequent changes of personnel of course contributed to the confusion. Murphy tried to untangle the complications involved in the education fund that had so long been accumulating; but he had only the figures of his predecessors to go by, and his pathetic appeal to the commissioner for specific instructions brought no immediate response. The Indians understood
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12 Murphy to Manypenny, May 25, 1855; Major H. Day to Manypenny, October 13, 1855, NARS, RG 75, LR. Day, then commanding officer at Fort Ridgely, was acting agent in Murphy's absence.
13 Ramsey to Manypenny, April 16, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, September 8, 1853, ibid.
14 Minnesota Pioneer, October 20 and 27, 1853; Murphy to Manypenny, July 20, 1855; Murphy to Gorman, July 27, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, December 30, 1854, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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that Lea had told them in 1851 that the $30,000 paid upon the signing of the treaty of Mendota was about half the accumulated sum, and they kept asking for the other half. Gorman and Little Crow went to Washington in the spring of 1855 and were promised (so the chief thought, at least) that this sum would be paid. As the time approached when some of the provisions of the 1837 treaty would expire, Commissioner Manypenny got to work on the problem and finally submitted to the Secretary of the Interior a seventeen-page letter detailing the various appropriations made and the uses to which they had been put since 1838. The mouse which this mountain of labor brought forth was the conclusion that the government owed the Indians $30,041.58, which sum he recommended Congress be asked to appropriate, provided the Treasury Department concurred. 15 There the matter rested for a time.
The withholding of the education fund was not the only respect in which the government failed to meet its obligations to the Sioux. For reasons not clear, appropriations during the early 1850's were insufficient to fulfill the provisions of the 1851 treaties. Not only did the Indians receive less money, goods, and provisions than they had a right to expect, but funds for the management of the agency were not forthcoming. The employees' wages were months, even years, in arrears, and improvements promised to the Indians languished in the planning stage or half completed for lack of funds. Furthermore, the physical problem of transporting supplies to the comparatively remote Sioux agency sometimes exceeded the powers of human ingenuity to solve. The Minnesota River could never be relied upon to be navigable at the season when goods and provisions reached St. Paul, and sometimes contractors had to default on their agreements. Add to this the inflationary effect of a rise in prices, which in 1855 resulted in the Indians' receiving only two thirds as much goods as they were accustomed to getting, and you have a situation extremely unpleasant for the Sioux and decidedly uncomfortable for Agent Murphy, whom they held immediately responsible for any shortages in their annuities. 16
The truth is that, even allowing for all the handicaps he labored under, Murphy does not seem to have exerted himself in behalf of the
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15 Murphy to Manypenny, September 28, 1855; Manypenny to McClelland, April 8, 1856, ibid. Congress did appropriate the sum of $42,841.47, which included the accumulated education fund, and $31,000 of it was paid in December of 1857. See William J. Cullen to Charles E. Mix, November 26 and December 24, 1857, ibid.
16 Gorman to Manypenny, July 18, 1854, and August 30, 1855; Murphy to Manypenny, November 4, 1855, ibid.
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Indians to the degree that a truly dedicated agent like Taliaferro would have. Even the missionaries, Riggs and Williamson, though not wishing to see him replaced by someone worse, had to qualify their testimonial in his favor with the remarks that "he may have given more attention to his own pecuniary interests than we suppose is compatible with the full discharge of the duties of a public officer"; and the best they could say for him was that he was as good as anyone else the Indians had had as agent for the previous sixteen years. 17 Like all his predecessors, Murphy came under attack from the traders, both licensed and unlicensed, who repeatedly tried to have him removed. Their grudge against him seems to have stemmed mainly from his refusal to license those living off the reservation and his later exclusion of all traders from the annuity payments. Although their complaints did not directly produce the desired effect, they may have undermined his position and thus prepared the way for his eventual dismissal. 18
The axe fell on Murphy's neck when the Minnesota Superintendency was abolished in 1856 and Indian affairs in the territory were placed under the jurisdiction of the Northern Superintendency, then in the charge of Francis Huebschmann. When the superintendent visited the agency in June, his Teutonic sense of order was offended by the easygoing way in which affairs there had been managed by Murphy and Gorman. He found conditions on the reservation "deplorable" and a "spirit of lassitude" prevailing. 19 Within a few weeks Murphy had been replaced by Charles E. Flandrau, a man of considerable experience as an Indian trader and apparently also a man of integrity. Under Flandrau things began to hum around the agency, though the results of his more vigorous administration did not become evident until after he had left office. He inherited an unfortunate state of affairs and was confronted with some new and extremely serious problems before he could feel his way into the job. Then, in the summer of 1857, he was named to the territorial supreme court and also served as a member of the convention to draw up a constitution for the proposed state of Minnesota.
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17 Memorandum from Stephen R. Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson to Manypenny, March 17, 1855, ibid. The reference to "sixteen years" is interesting, as that was the length of time since Taliaferro had resigned.
18 Murphy to Shields, January 28 and March 4, 1855; Murphy to Manypenny, March 21, 1855; Murphy to J. Ross Brown, March 24, 1855; Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855; Affidavit of James Wells, March 6, 1855, ibid.
19 McClelland to Manypenny, January 23, 1856, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency; Francis Huebschmann to Manypenny, July 19 and June 28, 1856, NARS, RG 75, LR. If conditions on the reservation were as bad as Huebschmann describes them, he had reason for dismissing Murphy.
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[mdenney]

These responsibilities kept him away from the agency much of the time, and finally he resigned his position after only thirteen months as agent for the Sioux.
While the government was gradually establishing a presence on the reservation, the missionaries were also turning their eyes in that direction. Except for Lac qui Parle, all the missions among the Santee Sioux were located on the ceded lands and hence were left, officially at least, without any Indians to minister to after the removal in 1853. Most of the missionaries remained where they were and continued their work among the white settlers, but Williamson elected to stay with the Indians. After nearly four years at Little Crow's village, he moved in the fall of 1852 to a point a few miles above the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River and there, among the upper Sioux, established a new mission called Pajutazee. In the late winter of 1854 the Lac qui Parle mission burned to the ground, and Riggs moved his mission down the Minnesota to a site not far from Williamson's and started a new station called Hazelwood. 20 These were the only missions on the reservation until 1860, when the Episcopal church began its work with the Sioux. Since no government schools were opened until the later fifties, despite treaty provisions for education, the missionary establishments provided the only educational opportunities available to the Indians for several years. Both Williamson and Riggs remained with the Sioux throughout the reservation period and were instrumental in organizing the first substantial effort on the part of the Indians to become farmers.
Besides their other contributions, which included a short-lived periodical, the Dakota Friend, or Dakota Tawxitku Kin, the missionaries exerted some influence over the course of government policy toward the Sioux. Although their influence at this time was not as great as it became after the Civil War, when for a time the religious bodies virtually took over Indian policy, it was far from negligible. On June 6, 1850, more than a year before the treaties, the members of the Dakota Mission met at Kapozha and drew up a formal "Outline of a Plan for Civilizing the Dakotas," which Governor Ramsey later submitted to Commissioner Lea. Among other objections, they found the Sioux then living too close together in their villages and the villages too far apart, and recommended that they all be removed to the upper Minnesota and encouraged to settle there in separate family units, on tracts of land which would eventually become their individual property. A
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20 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 315 ; Minnesota Pioneer, March 30, 1854.
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system of laws and government should gradually be imposed upon them. The missionaries asked for an educational fund of $12,000, over which the Indians would exercise no control. They proposed village schools in which the Sioux would be taught to read and write in their own language and a system of small manual labor boarding schools in which English would be the medium of instruction. Annuities, they said, should be paid semiannually, in cash, to individual heads of families rather than to the chiefs. The object of this plan was to break up the community system among the Sioux and eliminate the favoritism that prevailed when the chiefs controlled the distribution of annuities. No money should be paid to creditors of the Indians. Finally, mixed-bloods should share in annuities and other benefits received by the Indians from the government. 21 Whether as a direct result of this outline or for other reasons, many of these provisions were written into the treaties of 1851, and others became official policy during the reservation period.
The most dramatic event during Flandrau's brief term as agent was the massacre early in 1857 of a number of white settlers in the OkobojiSpirit Lake region of northwestern Iowa and the adjacent portion of Minnesota Territory by a renegade band of Wahpekutes under the leadership of an outlawed chief named Inkpaduta. The Wahpekutes had been split about 1840 by dissension leading to the murder of their old chief, Tasagi, by a rival, Wamdesapa. The followers of the latter, including Inkpaduta, had been expelled from the tribe and had since then led a nomadic life on the prairies of modern-day eastern South Dakota and adjoining parts of Iowa and Minnesota Territory. They had not taken part in the treaties of 1851, but had shown up now and then at annuity payments. According to one story, the brother of Inkpaduta had been wantonly slain, with all his family, in 1854 by a white whiskey-seller and horse thief named Henry Lott. Whatever the truth of this tale, Inkpaduta was fiercely hostile to the whites, although he concealed his hatred sufficiently when on his periodic begging expeditions among the whites, who by 1856 were beginning to settle on that remote frontier. 22
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21 Minnesota Pioneer, November 28, 1850; Ramsey to Lea, February 6, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR.
22 Thomas Hughes, "Causes and Results of the Inkpaduta Massacre," Minnesota Historical Collections, XII ( 1905- 1908), 264-269; Mankato Independent, August 1, 1857; Cullen to Commisioner James W. Denver, August 20, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. The literature of the Inkpaduta massacre is voluminous, and only the most useful primary and secondary sources are cited here. A good primary source is the official report of
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The winter of 1856-1857 was unusually severe, with intense cold and much snow. Even the annuity Indians suffered, and Inkpaduta's band managed to survive only by begging and committing depredations in the white settlements. After killing a settler's dog which had bitten one of their number, they were forcibly disarmed by a posse of whites. Unable to hunt without weapons, they were incensed by this action, somehow recovered their guns or replaced them, and took out their wrath by a general slaughter of whites in the vicinity. On March 8 and 9 they descended upon a settlement on the Okoboji lakes, killed some thirtyfour people, and took three women prisoner. Then they repeated the performance a few miles farther north on Spirit Lake, where they killed a settler and took his wife prisoner. A couple of weeks later they struck at another small settlement, called Springfield, near the present site of Jackson, Minnesota, where the people had been warned of their approach and had taken refuge inside one of the houses. The Indians killed the whites who had remained outside the improvised fort, plundered the store of the Woods brothers, and then disappeared. 23
When word of the first murders reached Flandrau at the agency on March 18, he immediately enlisted the aid of the commandant at Fort Ridgely in organizing an expedition to protect the settlers at Springfield. Because of the heavy snow, which Flandrau thought rendered any military action futile, the party sent from the fort under the command of Captain Bernard E. Bee did not reach the Springfield vicinity until after the Indians had left. Attempts to catch up with them were unsuccessful, although it was later learned that the soldiers had come near enough to be seen by the Indians. It is perhaps just as well that the soldiers did not encounter their quarry, for the Indians would almost certainly have killed their captives if attacked. Upon mature consideration and after the passage of some weeks, it was decided that the safety of these women took precedence over the punishment of their captors; and early in May, Indian Bureau officials and the military commanders concluded to send out a party of friendly Indians to effect the rescue of the women before any more troops were employed. 24
Meanwhile, there was intense excitement all along the frontier and
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Captain Bernard E. Bee, addressed to First Lieutenant H. E. Maynadier, Adjutant, 10th Infantry, Fort Ridgely, April 9, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency. A sound secondary source is William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, II ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1961), 400-415.
23 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 401-404.
24 Ibid., II, 404-406.
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well behind it. The size of Inkpaduta's force, actually composed of only twelve or fourteen men and some women and children, was greatly exaggerated, and rumors of a general Indian uprising spread throughout the territory. Petitions were received at Fort Ridgely calling for assistance to settlers on the Blue Earth and Watonwan rivers; people were "flocking in from the country by hundreds terribly frightened" to the infant towns of Mankato and St. Peter; hastily formed volunteer forces satisfied their hatred for Indians by attacking harmless bands who were hunting and fishing as they did every winter. Reports reached St. Paul and Faribault that Mankato and St. Peter had been sacked and that thousands of bloodthirsty warriors were sweeping down the Minnesota valley toward St. Paul. By the time the territorial legislature met on April 27, the excitement had largely abated, but there was a loud demand for the rescue of the prisoners and the punishment of the murderers. On May 15 the legislature appropriated $10,000 (which it did not have) for the rescue of the women held by Inkpaduta's band. 25
Five days after this gesture by the legislature, two Wahpetons turned up at the Riggs mission with one of the captives, Mrs. Margaret Ann Marble, and asked $500 apiece for their efforts in ransoming her from the renegades. Their success prompted Flandrau to send out a party of three Wahpetons on the twenty-third to bring back any of the remaining captives who might still be alive. After a month they returned with Abbie Gardner, whom they had found living with a band of Yanktons; the other two women had been killed. Now that all the surviving captives had been delivered up, the way was open to the punishment of the Indians. Late in June word reached Flandrau that a member of the band, Inkpaduta's son, was at the Yellow Medicine agency. Accompanied by a small force from Fort Ridgely, he went in pursuit of the man, who was killed and his wife taken prisoner on July 1. On his return to the lower agency, Flandrau was surrounded by hostile upper Sioux, who forced him to release the woman. He was then allowed to proceed but remained a virtual prisoner at the agency until the arrival July 5 of an artillery battery from Fort Ridgely. 26
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25 Charles E. Flandrau to Huebschmann, April 16, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR; Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, ed., History of Rice and Steele Counties ( Chicago: H. C. Cooper, Jr., and Co., 1910), I, 338; Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 406. The account in Curtiss-Wedge was written by Frederick W. Frink, who had started a newspaper in Faribault a few months before the massacre.
26 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 407-409. For greater ease of administration, a second agency was established about 1856 near the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River. From this time on, the original agency was referred to as the "lower agency"
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The next two weeks were extremely tense at the agency. After Flandrau left to participate in the constitutional convention at St. Paul, the newly appointed superintendent of Indian affairs, William J. Cullen, was in charge of the agency. Cullen had some anxious moments, especially after a Sisseton had stabbed a soldier and the superintendent was faced with the job of arresting the Indian. After some hostile displays by the Indians, the offender was finally delivered up on July 17, but he escaped shortly thereafter and was never recaptured. During that time Cullen was also trying to persuade the Indians to undertake the punishment of Inkpaduta themselves. He was under instructions from the new Indian Commissioner, James W. Denver, to accomplish the task in this way, without the aid of troops, and was authorized to withhold all annuities until Inkpaduta and his followers had been delivered up or killed. The Indians refused to go after Inkpaduta without a military escort, and for a time there was an impasse that had ominous overtones. Finally, on July 18, Little Crow offered his services, and in the next four days an expedition of more than a hundred men was fitted out and sent on its way. When they returned, on August 4, they reported the killing of three and possibly four of the band and brought with them two women and a child; Inkpaduta and four other men, they said, had separated from the rest of the band some weeks earlier and were now far to the west. Their mission only partly accomplished, the Indians refused positively to continue the campaign without troops. Cullen and a special agent, Kintzing Prichette, who had been sent from Washington, decided that the Indians had done all they could, that it was unjust to hold all the Sioux responsible for the misdeeds of a few, and that their annuities should be paid. The commissioner finally concurred late in August, and the payment was made about the middle of the next month. 27
The Inkpaduta affair and its sequel in the crisis at the agency had profound effects on Indians and whites alike. One obvious result of the failure to punish Inkpaduta himself (he was never captured), noted at the time and later, was that the Indians learned that attacks on whites could go unpunished and that Indian Bureau officials could be induced
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and the other one as the "upper agency." The Indian Office continued to use the name "St. Peter's" for both agencies.
27 Cullen to Denver, July 26 and August 20, 1857; Kintzing Prichette to Denver, August 16, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR; Mankato Independent, September 12 and October 3, 1857. The extensive correspondence carried on during and after the Inkpaduta affair by Indian Bureau officials and military officers is contained in 35th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 2, pp. 349-403.
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to back down from previously stated positions. Another result was that white settlers on the frontier became jittery; in the following years, whenever difficulties occurred at the agency, rumors of an uprising swept the countryside. Perhaps the most significant result, in the long run, was that hostility toward the Indians increased enormously. Relations between the Sioux and their white neighbors had been passably friendly up to this time; they became progressively less so after the so-called Spirit Lake massacre. Thus the danger of a real uprising was intensified because of a shift in the attitudes of both whites and Indians.
The most perceptive observations made at the time were those contained in a long report submitted by Special Agent Prichette the following October. After summarizing the events of the previous six months, he warned Commissioner Denver that the "causes of alienation" which produced the hostility of the Indians at the agency went beyond the mere temporary excitement. The complaints that he heard from the Indians at their councils all pointed to "the imperfect performance or non-fulfillment of treaty stipulations." As to the possibility of a war against the United States, he said that the chiefs who had acquired some knowledge of the strength of the nation realized that they could not permanently resist but thought that a war might lead to better treaties and thus benefit them in the long run. 28
So far as the civilization of the Sioux was concerned, Prichette believed that the hope of making them a permanent agricultural people, under existing circumstances, was "a vain dream of impracticable philanthropy." Why? Because experience had shown that "their advance towards such a condition, is but a new incitement to the desire of grasping their lands, increased in proportion, as they may have made them valuable by improvement and culture." He added the chilling comment that there was no chance of their being Christianized "so long as they are in direct contact with our own people." The only hope for the Sioux, as Prichette saw it, was their total isolation within limits "preserved and maintained inviolate by the plighted faith of the Nation." To accomplish this desired end, however, the "moral force of public opinion" would have to be enlisted. And the "moral force" of a people whose presence was a deterrent to the Christianization of the Indians was indeed a slender reed to lean on. The attitude of those people toward the Indians was suggested by an item in a Red Wing
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28 Prichette to Denver, October 15, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. Prichette said that the Indians cited Black Hawk as an example of one whose war, while outwardly futile, had actually brought more favorable treatment of the tribe afterward.
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newspaper noted by Prichette: "We have plenty of young men who would like no better fun than a good Indian hunt." In Minnesota he found that "but one sentiment appeared to inspire almost the entire population, and this was, the total annihilation of the Indian race within their borders." 29 Thus the objectives of the Indian Bureau and the missionaries were impossible of attainment in the face of a populace who found no room in their world for live Indians.
Hopeless though their mission may have been, the men in charge of Indian affairs went ahead with their work seemingly convinced that what they were doing would be crowned with success if they went at it intelligently, diligently, and honestly. Joseph Renshaw Brown, Flandrau's successor as agent, was a good choice for the job. He had long acquaintance with the Sioux as a trader and was married to a woman of Sioux descent. Building on the foundations laid by Flandrau, Brown inaugurated an era of real progress toward the realization of the civilization clauses in the 1851 treaties. More acreage was brought under cultivation, schools were opened, and several buildings, including at long last an agency, were erected. 30
Brown's achievement was not, of course, due entirely to his own initiative and driving energy. He had arrived on the scene when many of the Indians themselves were undergoing a fundamental change in their attitude toward farming and the white man's way of life. As game became increasingly scarce in their old hunting grounds--and as they themselves became increasingly unwelcome there--some of them began to consider more seriously the advice so persistently urged on them to cultivate the soil and live like white men. With the encouragement of missionary Riggs, a number of upper Sioux had in 1856 formed the "Hazelwood Republic," a voluntary association whose members agreed to abandon their native manners and dress and begin farming on individual allotments of land. Two years later a similar decision was made by a few of the lower Sioux, who elected a judge and council and threw off their tribal relations and customs. Superintendent Cullen
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29 Prichette to Denver, October 15, 1857, ibid.; St. Paul Daily Times, July 28, 1857.
30 35th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 2, pp. 345-349. During a brief stint as editor of the Minnesota Pioneer, Brown had written as though he accepted the prevailing notion that the Indian race was doomed to extinction and that it was only a matter of time before the new reservation would be ceded, but his conduct as agent belied this position. Likewise, although he had publicly sneered that Cullen would have been hard pressed to distinguish between a Sioux Indian and a snapping turtle, he seems to have got on well enough with his superior once installed as agent. See the Minnesota Pioneer, October 27, 1853, and the Pioneer and Democrat, July 18, 1857.
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himself performed the symbolic act of cutting the hair of sixteen men, to each of whom he gave two suits of clothing, a cow, a yoke of oxen, and a house equipped with a cooking stove. To encourage others to follow the example, Brown that year had forty-five houses built and a small tract of two to five acres of land broken in connection with each. The following year Cullen cut the hair of a hundred more of the lower Sioux, including the chiefs Wabasha and Wacouta, and a hundred houses were framed. By this time the Indians were cutting their own rails and making fences, and in 1860 the use of white men for agricultural labor was abandoned and the work turned over to the Indians. 31
Accepting the widespread conviction that individual ownership of land was essential to the civilization of the Sioux, Brown proposed to allot an eighty-acre tract to each head of family or other adult, with the expectation that eventually the Indians would qualify for fee patents to those allotments and become citizens. Since only that part of the reservation south of the Minnesota would be required for this purpose, the proposal was advanced by Cullen in his report to the commissioner in 1857 to dispose of the remainder of the reservation and use the receipts for the benefit of the Indians. Such a proposal would naturally meet with the favor of the white population of Minnesota, many of whom were already squatting on parts of the reservation. When the chiefs made their usual request for permission to visit Washington, Cullen took advantage of the opportunity to suggest to Acting Commissioner Charles E. Mix that this might be a good time to "effect a readjustment of their treaty" as he had advised in his annual report. 32
The result of this combination of circumstances was the treaty of June 19, 1858, the principal outcome of a four-month visit to Washington and the East by a selected group of chiefs representing both upper and lower Sioux. Actually two treaties, one with each division of the Santees but signed the same day, this document provided for the allotment in severalty of the southern half of the reservation, with the excess land to be held in common for the future use of the tribe, the allotments to be exempt from taxation, sale, or alienation in other ways even after patents had been issued. (The tax-exempt status could be altered by
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31 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1858, p. 50; Cullen to Denver, December 7, 1858; Cullen to Commissioner A. B. Greenwood, August 13, 1859; Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, April 15, 1860, NARS, RG 75, LR; 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 280. Cullen claimed to have cut the hair of two hundred men at the 1859 payment, but Brown's official report says one hundred.
32 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1857, p. 51; Cullen to Mix, December 24, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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the state legislature with the consent of Congress.) It also authorized the Senate to determine whether the Indians had a sound title to the reservation, and if so, what compensation should be paid them for the northern half. Provision was also made for the payment of "just debts" and for the building of roads across the reservation, and there was a significant clause which amended all previous treaty stipulations regarding the payment of specific sums for particular purposes and left the management of those sums to the discretion of the President. 33
This treaty was really an astonishing document, when one considers how much the Indians left to the discretion of the Senate or the President. In view of their experience in 1851, they might have been expected to drive a hard bargain and get all they could. Instead, they granted the government virtually carte blanche to do as it pleased with them and their property, including what they were entitled to under the terms of earlier treaties. As a matter of fact, there is some evidence that Little Crow, at least, put up a show of resistance. During the allnight council that climaxed the long stay in Washington, he told Commissioner Mix that "we have been so often cheated that I wished to be cautious, and not sign any more papers without having them explained, so that we may know what we are doing." There followed a dispute between the two, in the course of which Mix accused the chief of acting like a child. But the result was a foregone conclusion. After a "warm and protracted discussion," as one newspaper called it, the treaty was signed at 7 A.M., and the next day the delegation started for home, "strengthened in their purpose by what they [had] seen during their sojourn." 34
The aftermath was in some respects even more interesting than the treaty itself. Although the Senate ratified the treaties on March 9, 1859, and they were proclaimed at the end of that month, nothing was done toward determining the validity of the Indians' title to their reservation until 1860, more than two years after the signing of the treaty. Then the Senate confirmed the Indians' title and allowed them the sum of thirty cents an acre for the area relinquished. This was a better price than the Senate amendments to the 1851 treaties had allowed them-ten cents an acre--but the 1860 resolution also gave settlers on those lands the right of pre-emption at a price of $1.25 an acre!35 Brown
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33 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 781-789.
34 Pioneer and Democrat, June 29 and July 8, 1858.
35 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 789. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs had recommended that the Indians be paid at the rate of $1.25 an acre. See Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 397.
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thought the lands worth five dollars an acre. There was still worse to follow. When Congress finally appropriated $266,880 for the lands, nearly all of the payment to the lower Sioux and a large part of that to the upper bands went to pay the "just debts" of the traders, and the Indians saw but little of the money. Thus the disillusionment and bitterness they had come to feel toward the government was compounded by this treaty, supposedly designed for their benefit. 36
At the same time, other difficulties were doing much to negate the effectiveness of Brown's work in civilizing the Sioux. There was, for example, the never ending feud with the Chippewas. Alexander Ramsey had tried in 1850 to resolve the quarrel by the usual method of calling a council, which ended with the contending parties in total disagreement. 37 The raids and counterraids continued through the years, despite the removal of the Sioux to their reservation and the gradual filling up of the ceded territory with white settlers. When the government intervened, as it did in 1856, its hesitant and inconsistent policy did nothing either to diminish the warfare or to raise its own prestige with the Indians. 38
As a matter of fact, the government was rapidly losing the respect of the Sioux during these years. The agency warehouse was plundered in 1855, in 1856, and again in 1858, and no decisive retaliatory action was taken. The arrogance which this failure engendered among the dissatisfied Indians was heightened by the growing hostility of the Yanktons and Yanktonais, who resented the cession in 1851 of lands to which they thought they had a claim, and who sometimes showed up at annuity payments and extorted a "cut" from the Sissetons. In 1857 they burned several buildings and drove off white settlers who had established townsites in the area west of the present Minnesota line. 39
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36 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 393-400.
37 Minnesota Pioneer, June 13, 1850; Ramsey to Orlando Brown, June 15, 1850, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency.
38 Newspapers of the time and correspondence of the Indian Bureau contain numerous references to continued raids, including one in which a party of Chippewas invaded the heart of St. Paul and fired into a store that some Sioux had entered. See the Minnesota Pioneer, April 28, 1853. As late as 1860 a Red Wing newspaper noted that about two hundred of Wacouta's band had gone over into the Wisconsin timber to hunt. In January a few members of the band appeared in Red Wing with furs and venison which they traded for provisions to take back to the rest of their party. Hunting had been good, they said; they had bagged over a hundred deer, twenty bears, and four Chippewas. See the Red Wing Sentinel, November 12, 1859, and January 7, 1860.
39 Huebschmann to Manypenny, June 28, 1856; Huebschmann to Colonel E. B. Abercrombie, June 13, 1856; Flandrau to Cullen, August 7, 1857; Joseph R. Brown to Mix, May 23, 1858; Cullen to Mix, July 1, 1858, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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The Yanktons were partially mollified by a treaty in 1858 confirming to them the Pipestone quarry, which was within the cession made in 1851, but the Yanktonais remained hostile and wanted no dealings with the United States government. The Indian Bureau finally decided to pacify them by the distribution of some goods, and in 1859 Cullen was delegated to handle the business at the time of the regular annuity payments. After paying off the lower Sioux, he stopped at the upper agency, located near the Yellow Medicine River, learned that the census rolls were not complete, and decided to make his visit to the Yanktonais before paying the upper bands. The Indians demanded their annuities, however, and would not permit him to pass their lines, a few miles above the agency. After some inconclusive wrangling, they seized the bridles of Cullen's horses and turned them around so that they were headed back toward the lower agency. Cullen had no choice but to return to the agency, where he sent in a request for troops from Fort Ridgely. With military aid, he was able to get past the angry Sissetons on a second attempt, and later the Indians who had treated him so roughly were jailed. 40
Another source of trouble in the later fifties was the constant danger of clashes between Indians and white settlers. Despite a congressional appropriation in 1854 and repeated appeals by the agents and superintendents for a survey of the reservation boundaries, nothing was done until 1859 (and then done badly), by which time the General Land Office had already surveyed the adjacent territory and opened to settlement several townships wholly or partly within the reservation. The Indians, who had been accustomed to depredations in the white settlements farther east all through the decade, were even less inclined to respect the supposed rights of the settlers who innocently took up lands in these townships. The Indian Office was perpetually deluged with settlers' claims for damages, sometimes accompanied by petitions signed by large numbers of citizens and threatening drastic action in retaliation for the depredations. 41
Some of these claims were undoubtedly legitimate, but many prob-
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40 Cullen to Greenwood, June 24, 1859, and August 15, 1859, ibid.; Mankato Weekly Record, July 5 and 12, 1859.
41 U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 331; Henry M. Rice to Manypenny, January 18, 1855; Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, September 12 and December 5, 1858, and November 2, 1859; C. L. Emerson, Surveyor General, to Thomas A. Hendricks, Commissioner of the General Land Office, February 8, 1859; S. A. Smith, Commissioner of the General Land Office, to Greenwood, December 15, 1859, NARS, RG 75, LR; Mankato Weekly Record, November 1, 1859.
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ably represented nothing more than a desire to get some money out of the government. And Special Agent Prichette was doubtless right when he analyzed the motives behind the repeated demands for volunteer forces to drive the Indians out: "The object of this in certain quarters is to occupy important points, in advance, as the nucleus of settlements, with a view to speculation in town sites. . . ." 42
During Brown's last years in office, perhaps the most serious trouble at the agency stemmed from the growing hostility between those Indians who wished to adopt the manners of the whites and those who violently opposed any such move toward civilization. When the customary techniques of ridicule failed to deter the "farmer Indians" from their purpose, the "blanket" faction inaugurated a more or less systematic campaign of harassment intended to make life so uncomfortable for the farmers that they would abandon their efforts. Beginning with such forms of petty persecution as burning haystacks or stables, the campaign soon advanced to the stage of cattle-killing and from that point proceeded to the stage of open threats against the lives of those who persisted in the face of such persecution. In the winter of 1860 the farmer Indians were warned that no man who wore pantaloons the next summer would see the leaves fall. 43
It took a great deal of courage for a man to continue farming in the face of such threats, especially among the upper Sioux, where the anticivilization group was in the vast majority. In the spring of 1860 a succession of murders and retaliations led to the breakup of the Hazelwood Republic and the abandonment by its members of their claims. In August, 1860, an Indian of Mankato's band who had been shooting oxen used to haul materials for the building of houses announced that he would kill men as well as animals if necessary to stop the erection of more houses. Since Mankato was a chief of the lower Sioux, it was evident that by this time the infection was spreading down the Minnesota. Superintendent Cullen, like Brown, recognized the menace to their whole program and wrote the commissioner that summer: "There is no doubt that at the present time a great struggle for ascendancy is
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42 Prichette to Denver, July 28, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR.
43 Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, August 21, 1859; Brown to "Dear Col.," February 3, 1860; Brown to Cullen, February 6, 1860, ibid. Some of these threats were carried out in 1859 and 1860. The usual method was to induce the victim to drink whiskey and then draw him into a quarrel when he was drunk, thus making his death appear the result of one of the drunken altercations that were becoming increasingly common on the reservation as the proximity of white settlements made the introduction of liquor much easier than it had been before.
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taking place among the Sioux between the civilized or improvement Indians who have adopted our habits and customs and those who still retain the savage mode of life." 44 But aside from imprisoning the insurgent who wanted to stop the building of houses, there was not a great deal the agent or superintendent could do without military assistance; and there were never enough troops at Fort Ridgely for any of them to be spared for continuous duty at the agency.
By 1860, therefore, it was clear that Agent Brown, his white and Indian employees, the missionaries, and the farmer Indians were sitting on a powder keg. The more successful Brown was in his efforts to make farmers out of the Indians, the more opposition was stirred up and the more violent it became. His hope was that, with the aid of troops to protect the farmers, he could induce enough Indians to follow their example so that they would constitute a majority. This goal seemed almost within sight among the lower Sioux, but at the same time the opposition there was growing at an alarming rate. Some of the most hostile of the upper Sioux were no longer showing up for their annuities, but had taken up residence with their wild Yanktonai cousins; at the same time the presence of those cousins just west of the reservation constituted a perpetual menace. What might have happened if Brown had been permitted to stay on the job for a few more years must forever remain in the realm of conjecture. The vagaries of political expediency dictated that he and nearly all of his employees, as well as Superintendent Cullen, should be turned out of office when a new administration took over in 1861 and replaced by inexperienced men who had been faithful servants of their party in the campaign of 1860.
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44 Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, March 3, May 17, and August 11, 1860; Brown to Captain G. A. De Russy, August 10, 1860; Cullen to Greenwood, July 16, 1 86), ibid.
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
· Page No: *
CHAPTER 6
Catastrophe
THE TIME-HONORED practice of "cleaning out" officeholders of the defeated party and replacing them with stalwarts who had contributed to an election victory was never more sweepingly followed than by the Republicans after the election of 1860. In the Indian Service the process went so far, in some instances, as to include physicians, blacksmiths, and laborers. Among the Minnesotans who expected--and received-rewards for their service to the party were three men who were to be associated with the Santee Sioux in the next few years. Clark W. Thompson replaced Cullen as Northern Superintendent, Thomas J. Galbraith was nominated to the position of Sioux agent, and St. André Durand Balcombe was given the Winnebago Agency. None had had any previous experience with Indians.
Of these three the one who had the most to do with the Sioux before the outbreak of 1862 was, of course, Galbraith. Though a man of ability and probably of integrity, he was handicapped not only by his inexperience but by traits of character and personality that would have made him a dubious choice for the job of Indian agent at any time, and an extremely unwise selection for the post he received in the spring of 1861. His official letters show him to have been a man supremely confident of his own rectitude, scornful of advice, inclined to oversimplify situations, and doggedly determined to cling to his interpretation of a situation and to justify his course of action afterward, regardless of the
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consequences that might have followed. By the testimony of men who had no reason, decades later, to hold a grudge against him, he was arrogant, stubborn, emotionally unstable, and a hard drinker. John P. Williamson, son of the old missionary to the Sioux, wrote, as the Indians were being shipped into exile in 1863, that he hoped Galbraith would not appear at their new home. Galbraith's political enemies charged him with cowardice--an accusation that receives some support from the military men who observed him under stress just before the uprising. 1
All this attention to the character and personality of Galbraith will not seem irrelevant if it is remembered that when Little Crow began to negotiate with Colonel Sibley in the dying days of the uprising, he started his letter with these words: "Dear Sir: For what reason we have commenced this war I will tell you, it is on account of Maj. Galbrait. . . ." 2 The causes of the Sioux Uprising are manifold and complex, but it is no exaggeration to say that Thomas J. Galbraith had more to do with bringing on the war than any other single individual. If the picture of him that emerges from contemporaneous and later testimony and from his own correspondence is substantially correct, his appointment as Sioux agent was a political blunder of major proportions.
When Galbraith arrived at the agency in May, 1861, he found the Indians disturbed by a rumor, allegedly spread by southern sympathizers, that the annuities would not be paid that summer. He denied this report and was able to make the payment almost on schedule, but not without military help and not without difficulty. The upper bands, described by the agent as "restive, turbulent, saucy, insolent, impudent and insulting," were furious over the deduction of some $9,000 from their annuities to pay depredations claims. Deductions for that purpose
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1 William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, II ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1961), 222 n.; Mankato Semi-Weekly Record, September 10 and October 1, 1861; Lucius F. Hubbard and Return I. Holcombe, Minnesota in Three Centuries ( Mankato: Publishing Society of Minnesota, 1908), III, 292-295. Folwell quotes Judge Martin J. Severance as saying, in an interview with the local historian Thomas Hughes, more than forty years after the uprising, that Galbraith "had no diplomacy and treated the Indians arrogantly," and adding that he was wholly unfit for his job. Holcombe's account of troubles at the upper agency in 1862, apparently based on interviews with Lieutenant Timothy J. Sheehan, includes the story that Galbraith tried to bolster his spirits with "Dutch courage," i.e., whiskey.
2 Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, p. 444.
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had long been customary, but never had the amount been so great, nor the evidence to support the claims so skimpy. 3
Although Galbraith forwarded to his superiors a memorial from the Indians protesting to Congress against this extortion, he showed no comprehension of certain other manifestations of their hostility. The most acutely dissatisfied and turbulent elements had formed a "soldiers' lodge," an institution observed as early as Hennepin's time and designed to enforce a temporary discipline on the normally anarchic Sioux. Galbraith supposed this organization to be identical with the anti-civilization faction that had caused so much unrest during Brown's last years as agent. No doubt the two groups included many of the same individuals, but Galbraith's insistence that they were the same organization was an oversimplification of the situation, as was his attempt to trace the origins of the group to Inkpaduta's band of renegades. He also succumbed to the conspiracy theory, so often used by Americans to explain the inexplicable, and exaggerated the influence of "rebel emissaries." 4
The Civil War did, however, unquestionably complicate the government's problem of meeting its obligations to the Indians. Whatever the influence of "Copperheads," the Indians could see with their own eyes that the government was neglecting some of its responsibilities to them and that the country was being drained of young white men to fill the Union armies. Coupled with newspaper reports of defeats suffered by these armies, such observations inevitably led some of the Indians, already smoldering with resentment toward the government for its treatment of them, to wonder if the time might be approaching for them to strike back. The virtual loss of the corn crop to cutworms in 1861, followed by a winter of near-starvation, increased their discontent and spread it to people who heretofore had been largely passive.
The two months immediately preceding the outbreak of August,
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3 Thomas J. Galbraith to Clark W. Thompson, June 4 and July 3 1, 1861; Cyrus Aldrich to Commissioner William P. Dole, July 16, 1861, NARS, RG 75, LR. $5,500 of the sum charged against the Indians was for losses allegedly suffered by the trading firm of Carothers and Blake, whose post on Big Stone Lake had been robbed by some Indians. The Sioux considered the amount extortionate, in view of the fact that the robbery had been committed by two men, who could not possibly have run off with goods to that amount. They especially resented the fact that they had known nothing of the deduction until Galbraith informed them of it just before the payment.
4 Galbraith to Thompson, July 30, 1861, ibid.
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1862, were a period of alternating tension and relaxation. As the customary time for the annuity payments drew near, the Indians became increasingly anxious. The same rumors that had unsettled them the previous year sprang up anew, spread in some cases by the traders, who refused to extend further credit to the Indians on the ground that there would be no annuities from which the debts could be paid. Late in June representatives of the upper bands obtained assurance from Galbraith that the payment would be made, although not before July 20. On July 14, by which time the goods and provisions had arrived but not the money, Galbraith was confronted with some five thousand hungry Indians, including a thousand Yanktonais, demanding that the provisions be issued. In keeping with his inflexible character, he refused to make a separate issue of provisions and insisted that the whole payment await the arrival of the money, as was the established procedure. 5
Although Galbraith did, under pressure, dole out enough food to keep the Indians alive, they did not go home as he wished them to do, and on August 4 violence broke out. Despite the presence of a detachment of troops from Fort Ridgely, the Indians decided that the time had come to go after the provisions, so tantalizingly near in the warehouse, trusting that they would be able to get away with it. After first surrounding the troops, whom they had previously advised that there would be a peaceful demonstration, they sent a party of braves to assault the warehouse door and carry off the provisions. Before they could get more than a few sacks of flour out, the military commander, Lieutenant Timothy J. Sheehan, trained one of his two howitzers on the door and then marched into the warehouse via the lane speedily formed by the Indians. Here he confronted Galbraith, who, according to some accounts, was too frightened to do anything on his own initiative, and urged him to make an issue of provisions to the Indians. 6 A small issue was made, but it did not satisfy the Indians, who still refused to leave until all their provisions were distributed. After two more days of tension the agent, on the advice of missionary Riggs and the military commander, held a council and offered to issue the annuity goods and provisions on condition that the Indians would then go home and not
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5 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 228-229. By common consensus, the best history of the Sioux Uprising, its causes, and its consequences is that by Folwell, pp. 109-301, and appendix, pp. 361 - 450. Because that volume has been readily accessible since its republication in 1961, in the following account citations are provided only for quotations and other information not found in Folwell.
6 Hubbard and Holcombe, Minnesota in Three Centuries, III, 295.
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return until summoned to receive the money annuities. The issue was then made, and on August 10 the Indians left the agency. 7
The delay in the arrival of the money annuity was due in part to the exigencies of the war, in part to an experiment undertaken the previous year by the new administration. According to the best available evidence, it had been decided to shift from a cash annuity to one paid in goods. A start in that direction had been made in 1861, when a $20,000 advance on the 1862 cash annuity was paid in goods. The Indians objected so strenuously to the loss this would entail in their cash annuities for the next year that the Indian Bureau was persuaded to make up the deficiency out of the projected 1863 annuities. This course meant that the payment would have to await passage of the Indian appropriations act for 1863, which was not finally approved until July 5, 1862. Then the question arose as to whether the payment might not be made in greenbacks rather than in the customary gold coin. This issue was not settled until early in August, just about the time that matters were becoming critical at the Yellow Medicine agency. After some correspondence between Superintendent Thompson and Commissioner Dole, in which Thompson warned of the danger of an outbreak, $70,000 in coin was finally sent. The money arrived in St. Paul on August 16, just in time to reach Fort Ridgely at noon on the eighteenth, "by which hour some hundred white people lay in or about their homes dead or bleeding from wounds," as Folwell says. 8
In all the troubles that the successive agents had had with the Sioux in the previous three or four years, it was the upper bands, sometimes in conjunction with the Yanktonais, who received the blame. True, the lower bands had the heaviest grievances. They had had to leave their old homes, as most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons had not; they had seen their payment under the 1858 treaty diverted to the traders, while the upper bands received at least something; and they were the principal sufferers from white intrusion on the reservation. Yet through all the years of turmoil at the Yellow Medicine the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes had remained apparently docile. If the Sioux Uprising had been the carefully matured conspiracy that some contemporary observers believed it to be, all logic would have pointed to the upper bands as the ones most likely to erupt in violence. Why, then, was it the lower Sioux who did most of the fighting when the uprising came---and suffered most of the punishment? The answer is that the outbreak came
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7 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 230.
8 Ibid., II, 238; Thompson to Dole, August 5, 1862, NARS, RG 75, LR.
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about by accident, not by plan, and that the accident which produced it involved the lower Sioux more immediately than the upper.
Yet it was not entirely blind chance. In the last days before the war began, several events happened that brought tempers to the boiling point among the lower Sioux. First of all, Little Crow seems to have been present at the payment reluctantly made by Galbraith to the upper bands on August 8 and 9, at which time he obtained a promise that a similar issue of provisions would be made at the lower agency. This promise was not kept. About a week later a council was held between the Indians, represented by Little Crow, and the traders and Galbraith. When no information was received as to the time of the payment and no concessions were made in the matter of credit by the traders, Little Crow is supposed to have announced grimly: "We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves." Galbraith, apparently unequal to making a decision himself, turned to the traders and asked them what they would do. After some consultation among themselves, their spokesman, Andrew J. Myrick, first tried to evade the issue by leaving, but when called back by the agent, snarled: "So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass." When this incredibly heartless remark was interpreted for the Indians by the younger Williamson, "there was a moment of silence, followed by savage whoops and wild gestures, with which the Indians disappeared." 9
Yet even the calculated insult of Andrew Myrick did not of itself bring on the Sioux Uprising, though it rankled in the minds of Little Crow and his people and turned up later in the chief's letter to Sibley. The highly inflammable situation on the Sioux reservation in midAugust, 1862, required something to ignite it--some incident that would lead the Indians to feel that they had nothing to lose by going to war, that their hand had been forced, and that there was no retreat for them. Such an incident was provided on August 17, about forty miles
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9 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 233. In Little Crow's letter to Sibley he accuses Myrick of telling the Indians that they could eat grass "or their own dung." See Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, p. 444. Victorian reticence may account for the omission of the last phrase from Winifred W. Barton's mention of the incident, on which Folwell relies. See her biography, John P. Williamson, a Brother to the Sioux ( Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1919), pp. 18, 46, 48-52.
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from the agency, in Acton township, Meeker County. That Sunday morning four young men, members of a band that had seceded from Shakopee's village, were returning from a hunting expedition. The discovery of some hen's eggs along a fence on the land of a white settler led to an argument as to whether one of the party was brave enough to kill a white man. A dare was made and taken, and they went on to the home of the settler, Robinson Jones. Before the morning was over, Jones, his wife, an adopted daughter, and two other white men lay dead, and the four Indians were hurrying back to the reservation. The "Acton Massacre," trivial in its causes, is credited with setting off the bloody conflict known to history as the Sioux Uprising.
But for the combination of circumstances existing among the Sioux at that time, the Acton killings might have had no more serious consequences than the Inkpaduta affair of 1857. The culprits would have been delivered up to the authorities for punishment; or if they fled, pressure would have been put on the chiefs to have them captured, or perhaps troops would have been sent after them. But in August, 1862, the Indians were not disposed to wait to see what the white men would do. Little Crow may have believed that "the whites would take a dreadful vengeance because women had been killed," as he said in justification of his decision for war, but the Sioux had sufficient reasons for opening hostilities without this fear. Most of their grievances have already been mentioned: bitterness over the treaties of 1851; the nonfulfillment or tardy fulfillment by the government of obligations incurred under the terms of those treaties; the treaty of 1858 and the deception (as the Indians saw it) practiced upon them in turning over most of the proceeds from the ceded lands to the traders; the highhanded manner in which the white authorities had sought to punish the whole Sioux nation for the misbehavior of the outlaw Inkpaduta; the advantage which the Indians believed, with reason, was being taken of them by their traders; the increasing pressure of white settlement near and even on the reservation, which, coupled with the uncertainty of the Indians' tenure, seemed to foreshadow a time when they would again be bullied into signing a treaty and be forced to move once more.
To these grievances should be added a few others, mentioned by the Indians themselves and therefore evidently of substantial moment in their thinking. Some thirty years after the uprising, Big Eagle, one of the chiefs who had opposed war at the start but had later fought in most of the battles, told of the reasons his people had when they began a conflict which even some of their leaders recognized as suicidal from
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the start. Besides objecting to the sharp practices of the traders, whose word was always accepted in preference to that of an Indian, who kept no books, and to the abuse of Indian women by white men, Big Eagle complained of the agents' efforts to induce the Indians to become farmers. His words provide an insight into the Indians' point of view:
Then the whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men--go to farming, work hard and do as they did--and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway. It seemed too sudden to make such a change. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians. 10
Underlying all of these actions that Big Eagle found objectionable was the ingrained and apparently ineradicable racial arrogance of the white man. Big Eagle said: "Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, 'I am much better than you,' and the Indians did not like this." 11 The same attitude of superiority is expressed in somewhat more sophisticated fashion in Galbraith's official report for 1863, in which he says: "To be clear, 'the habits and customs of white men are at war with the habits and customs of the Indians.' The former are civilization, industry, thrift, economy; the latter, idleness, superstition, and barbarism. . . ." 12 The insufferable smugness and complacency of the white man finds its ultimate expression in the words of Charles A. Bryant, historian of the uprising. The conflict of Indian and white he saw as "a conflict of knowledge with ignorance, of right with wrong"; since the Indian did not obey the divine injunction to subdue the earth, he was "in the wrongful possession of a continent required by the superior right of the white man." 13 Big Eagle never read Bryant's book. If he had done so, perhaps he would have been impelled to precipitate another uprising.
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10 Return I. Hotcombe, ed., "A Sioux Story of the War," Minnesota Historical Collections, VI ( 1894), 384.
11 Ibid., 385.
12 Quoted in Charles S. Bryant and Abel B. Murch, A History of the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians in Minnesota ( Cincinnati: Rickey and Carroll, 1864), p. 51. Galbraith offered as a "settled fact" in his mind the theory that "the encroachments of Christianity, and its handmaid civilization, upon the habits and customs of the Sioux Indians, is the cause of the late terrible Sioux outbreak." Although to Galbraith the fault, of course, lay with the Sioux, he conceded (or perhaps boasted) that Christianity had in most instances "waded to success through seas of blood. . . ." See ibid., p. 50.
13 Ibid., pp. 48-49. The title page of Bryant's book bears the legend: "For that which is unclean by nature thou canst entertain no hope; no washing will turn the Gipsy white. Ferdousi."
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The military history of the Sioux Uprising has been told and retold so many times and in such detail that only the general outlines need to be sketched in here. When the Acton murderers returned to their village on Rice Creek on the evening of August 17, they made known the events of the day to the chief of their band, Hochokaduta, who sought the counsel of Shakopee. There seems to have been a general consensus that war was inevitable and might as well be initiated by the Indians, but before taking the fatal step these Indians naturally wanted to enlist the widest possible support from the other bands. A council was held that night at Little Crow's house, and his leadership in the forthcoming action was finally obtained. According to the received tradition, Little Crow recognized the futility of a war against the whites and argued against it until he was taunted with cowardice, whereupon he agreed to lead his warriors and ordered the massacre to begin the next morning at the lower agency. Little Crow had recently been defeated in a contest for speaker of the lower Sioux, and it is supposed that he saw the opportunity now offered him as a chance to regain face. 14
The war broke in full fury on the morning of August 18. Soon after daylight a party of warriors attacked the lower agency, killing all the whites they could find, including both such long-time friends as Philander Prescott and men they had good reason to hate, such as trader Myrick, whose mouth they stuffed with grass. Soon they fell to looting the agency stores, however, and thus permitted many of the whites to escape by way of the ferry to the north side of the Minnesota and from there to Fort Ridgely. Since the uprising soon became general and spread over the countryside, some of them were killed before they could reach the safety of the fort. Likewise, settlers on both sides of the river were killed in great numbers during the first forty-eight hours of the war. News of the outbreak did not reach the upper agency at once, and when it did there was sharp division among the Sissetons and Wahpetons as to whether they should join. In later years members of those tribes were to insist that the uprising was all the work of the lower bands. This claim was exaggerated, but it does appear that the element opposed to the war was strong enough among the upper Sioux to prevent their wholehearted participation. Most of the whites at the upper
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14 Holcombe, "A Sioux Story of the War,"387. Big Eagle says that the Sioux looked upon the war as a means of healing dissension that had broken out in the tribe. For an imaginative reconstruction of what Little Crow may have said on this occasion, see "Taoyateduta Is Not a Coward," Minnesota History, XXXVIII ( September 1962), 115. This oration is supposed to have been obtained from Little Crow's son, Wowinapa, after his capture.
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agency were able to escape on August 19, with the help of the faithful John Other Day. The agency buildings, however, were burned and looted there, too.
It should be pointed out that most of the principal chiefs of both the lower and upper Sioux, such as Wabasha, Wacouta, Traveling Hail (who had won the election for speaker), Red Iron, and Standing Buffalo, were opposed to the uprising and either took no part or joined very reluctantly in a few battles, meanwhile giving all the aid they safely could to white victims. The Sioux were at no time united, at no time committed as a nation to the purposes of the hostile minority. Furthermore, even those chiefs who did take an active part in hostilities were able to exercise no really effective discipline over their men. These facts go far to explain why the Sioux Uprising was so brief in comparison with other Indian wars, despite certain initial advantages to the Indians, such as that of almost total surprise.
The Sioux Uprising divides itself into two phases: a short period of about a week when the Indians were on the offensive, and a longer period when they were gradually driven back by growing military forces. Even during the former period they won only one engagement, the battle of Redwood Ferry. As soon as news of the killings at the lower agency reached Fort Ridgely, the commander of the post, Captain John S. Marsh, set out for the agency, about thirteen miles upstream and across the river, with forty-six men and an interpreter. He and his men were ambushed at the ferry, and more than half the party killed. Marsh himself was drowned. Indian losses are supposed to have been one killed. The one-sided outcome of this skirmish was due mainly to Marsh's ignorance of the danger into which he was plunging himself and his men, but it had the effect of convincing the Indians that they could kill white men like sheep. Their overconfidence led them to exert less than their fullest energies in later, more important battles and thus indirectly contributed to their ultimate defeat.
The Sioux leaders were not without some conception of strategy. Although the uprising had not been planned in detail, there had doubtless been discussion at various times of the best way to conduct a war against the whites. Two points had to be taken to open the way for a sweep down the Minnesota valley: Fort Ridgely and the German town of New Ulm, on the south bank of the river a few miles below the reservation. Little Crow and other astute chiefs recognized that Fort Ridgely was the more vital and wished to attack that point first, but they were over-
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ruled by the young braves, who were attracted by the prospects of plunder in the poorly defended town. This lack of control over their warriors cost the Sioux leaders the opportunity to attack either position in full force, though either might have been taken with comparatively slight loss in the first two days of the war.
New Ulm was attacked twice, once on August 19 and again on the twenty-third. The first attack was a badly planned and badly coordinated affair and failed to accomplish its purpose or to inflict many casualties. The second, however, was a major assault, directed with some skill by competent Sioux leaders. With the advantage of superior numbers, the Indians nearly took the town. By that time the defenders had been reinforced, however, and they were finally able to turn back the assault, at a cost of thirty-four dead and sixty wounded and the loss by fire of most of the town, which was evacuated two days later. As Big Eagle was to say later, the defenders of New Ulm had "kept the door shut" to the projected push down the valley.
Between the two attacks on New Ulm an even more important battle was taking place at Fort Ridgely. Had the Indians attacked on the eighteenth or the nineteenth, as Little Crow wished to do, they could almost certainly have taken the fort, which was woefully undermanned after the debacle at Redwood Ferry. By the twentieth, however, when they finally did attack, reinforcements had come, and the Indians were unable to penetrate the fort's defenses without incurring heavier losses than their concept of warfare permitted. Attacking from concealed positions in ravines nearby, Little Crow and his warriors (probably fewer than four hundred) were driven back by artillery fire and finally abandoned the assault. After a day of heavy rain, they attacked again on the twenty-second, at least eight hundred strong, but failed to set fire to the rain-soaked roofs and were driven out of outlying buildings they had briefly occupied. The Indians then launched a final great assault which, well conceived and well directed, might very well have succeeded but for the devastating fire of the twenty-four-pound cannon. The second battle of Fort Ridgely was no mere raid or ambush; it was real war. Some hint of its ferocity can be gained from the official report, which concluded: "Thus, after six hours of continuous blazing conflict, alternately lit up by the flames of burning buildings and darkened by whirling clouds of smoke, terminated the second and last attack." 15
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15 Board of Commissioners, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861-1865, I I ( St. Paul: Pioneer Press Co. [ 1893]), 186.
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The military importance of the battles of Fort Ridgely, like those at New Ulm, is that they halted the momentum of the Sioux campaign, disrupted the strategy of the Indian leaders, and prevented the realization of the dream of a grand sweep down the Minnesota valley all the way to Fort Snelling.
While the main body of the Sioux warriors was alternately attacking Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, smaller parties were carrying out raids all over southwestern Minnesota. Among the places where white casualties were heavy were Milford Township in Brown County, Lake Shetek in Murray County, and portions of Kandiyohi County. In most cases the men were killed, the women and children taken prisoner and held until the final defeat of the Indians at Wood Lake. Much of our information about the uprising comes from the stories told by those captives. In addition to a good deal of brutality, these accounts frequently tell of kindness and even heroism on the part of individual Indians toward their white prisoners. Early accounts of the uprising seized upon the occasional instances of torture and mutilation, exaggerated them, and conjured up a picture of wholesale atrocities unparalleled in the history of Indian warfare. Some of the stories revel in details of babies nailed living to walls, of unborn infants torn from the maternal womb and flung in the faces of the dying mothers, of bodies hacked up beyond all recognition. Like Falstaff's story of the men he battled, however, the closer these stories are scrutinized, the less foundation there seems to be for them. Although the earth between Fort Ridgely and the lower agency was supposed to be virtually carpeted with multilated bodies, Dr. Jared W. Daniels, who accompanied a burial party and who should have recognized cases of mutilation if anyone would, categorically denied that the corpses he saw had been mutilated. Atrocities there no doubt were, as there have been in every war since the beginning of time, and they were not all committed by the Indians. But these isolated instances were multiplied in the imagination of refugees and their details exaggerated to such a degree that the early accounts can no longer be accepted by sober scholarship. 16
Before the momentum of the Sioux attack had spent itself, countermeasures were put into motion by state officials, and soon the initiative assed from the Indians to their enemies. As soon as Governor Alexander Ramsey learned of the first attacks, he commissioned former
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16 Governor Ramsey gave official sanction to the atrocity stories by repeating some of the most lurid in his special message to the legislature, September 9, 1862, printed in Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, pp. 3-15 (extra session).
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· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial
· Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
· Publication Date: 1993
· Page No: *
Governor Henry H. Sibley to lead an expedition against the Sioux, with whom Sibley had traded and hunted in years past. Quickly assembling a force, Sibley moved toward the theater of war, and by August 27 his advance guard had reached Fort Ridgely, whose garrison was greatly strengthened by the arrival of the additional troops. After his arrival on the twenty-eighth, Sibley awaited reinforcements and sent out a party to reconnoiter and to bury any bodies they found. This party, under the over-all command of Joseph R. Brown, unwittingly provided the Indians with another chance to defeat the whites, an opportunity of which they again did not take full advantage. A portion of Brown's force camped on the night of September 1 near a small stream called Birch Coulee, across the river from the lower agency. Like Fort Ridgely, the site could easily be approached from cover, a fact which did not escape the Indians' notice. They began an attack before sunrise and continued it all day, with gradually decreasing intensity. Not until late on the morning of the third were the besieged troops relieved by forces sent out by Sibley. Thirteen killed and fortyseven wounded--the heaviest military losses of the war--were the result of an unwise selection of a campsite; as at the other battles, the Indian losses were slight--two killed, according to Big Eagle.
Although Little Crow was able to launch attacks on outlying settlements like Forest City and Hutchinson and although raids were to continue for many months, the fury of the uprising was spent by early September, and the main task facing the military commanders was to convince the Indians that they could not win and that the sooner they surrendered the better it would be for them. To take advantage of any wavering of purpose that might exist among the hostiles, Sibley had left a message for Little Crow on the Birch Coulee battlefield in hopes of opening negotiations for the release of the captives. A reply, dated September 7, rehearsed the Indians' grievances, including the delay in the issue of provisions "till our children was dieing with hunger," and mentioned the captives only enough to remind Sibley of their presence in the Indian camp. 17 No doubt Little Crow realized their utility as hostages and wished to make the best terms he could. Unfortunately for his purposes, dissension among his people was increasing day by day, and some important chiefs were only awaiting an opportunity to dissociate themselves from the war and its principal architect. On September 12, Sibley received a secret message from Wabasha and Taopi (chief of the farmer Indians) inquiring about terms of surrender. The lower bands
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17 Ibid., p. 444.
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had by this time evacuated the area of their reservation and were congregating near the village of the upper Sioux chief Red Iron, in what is now the eastern tip of Lac qui Parle County.
About the same time, the lower Sioux gave a feast which was attended by most of the men of both divisions. The advantages and disadvantages of surrender were thoroughly discussed at this council. Paul Mazakutemane, formerly head of the Hazelwood Republic and a leading Christian Indian, made a speech in which he charged the lower Indians with having started the war without consulting the upper bands, pointed out the hopeless odds facing them now, and pleaded for the surrender of the captives. In reply, Rda-in-yan-ka, Wabasha's sonin-law, delivered an oration which, if correctly reported, probably summed up the position of the more intelligent among those who favored continuing the war. The speech, as printed in the earliest history of the uprising, deserves quotation at full length:
I am for continuing the war, and am opposed to the delivery of the prisoners. I have no confidence that the whites will stand by any agreement they make if we give them up. Ever since we treated with them their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. Some of our people have been shot, some hung; others placed upon floating ice and drowned; and many have been starved in their prisons. It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four returned from Acton and told what they had done. When they did this, all the young men became excited, and commenced the massacre. The older ones would have prevented it if they could, but since the treaties they have lost all their influence. We may regret what has happened but the matter has gone too far to be remedied. We have got to die. Let us, then, kill as many of the whites as possible, and let the prisoners die with us. 18
Whether because of the eloquence of his appeal or for other reasons, the decision was made to continue the war. As the council broke up, the braves rode off, singing:
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18 Isaac V. D. Heard, History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863 ( New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863), pp. 151-152. The authenticity of this speech may be questioned; Heard gives no source for it. Paul Mazakutemane provides a remotely similar version, much less eloquent, in "Narrative of Paul Mazakootemane," trans. by Rev. S. R. Riggs, Minnesota Historical Collections, III ( 1870- 1880), 82-90. Still, it is probably as accurate as most of the renditions of speeches by Indians, such as the memorable words of Logan as recorded by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. It has the flavor of the letter dictated by Rda-in-yan-ka four days before his death and translated by Riggs.
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Over the earth I come;
Over the earth I come;
A soldier I come;
Over the earth I am a ghost. 19
The "friendlies" were thus not in a position to seize the captives from Little Crow and make a separate peace with the whites. Sibley realized that in order to bring about such an eventuality, he would first have to inflict a decisive defeat on Little Crow's forces. In the battle of Wood Lake he did so. That battle, which involved relatively large forces on both sides, started by accident when some soldiers in search of potatoes stumbled upon Indians hidden in the grass, awaiting the moment set for attack. After about two hours of fighting, the Sioux were defeated with a loss of sixteen killed, as compared to only seven on the other side--the only major clash in which the admitted Indian losses outnumbered those of the whites. The battle of Wood Lake, fought on September 23, ended Little Crow's last hope of winning the war. Soon thereafter he and his loyal followers fled to the Dakota prairies, where they assumed, correctly, that no military force would be able to pursue them so late in the season.
Their flight left the way open for those who had opposed the war or who had tired of it to deliver up the captives and make peace on such terms as they could obtain. Sibley entered the friendly camp three days after the battle and took possession of the 269 men, women, and children, both whites and half-breeds, who had been held by the Sioux since their capture early in the war. Although bitterly denounced by many Minnesotans for the extreme caution of his movements, Sibley almost certainly prevented a general slaughter of the captives by not rushing pell-mell into battle with the Sioux while Little Crow still had them in his possession. By recovering the prisoners and driving the hostile Sioux from the state, he had accomplished the two purposes of his expedition. Although Little Crow was still at large and raids conducted by small, irregular bands continued for more than two years afterward, the purely military phase of the Sioux Uprising may be said to have ended on September 27 at Camp Release.
There remained the question of what to do with the twelve hundred Indians taken into custody at Camp Release and the others who drifted in or were rounded up by detachments from Sibley's force later. The way this problem was met in the weeks that followed constitutes one of
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19 "Narrative of Paul Mazakootemane," p. 85.
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