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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:42:17 GMT -5
other government agencies seemed unaware that earlier hopes had not been realized. In 1894 the House subcommittee on Indian affairs was considering abandoning the Santee agency, presumably because the Indians were thought to be almost assimilated and able to look out for themselves. 61 Fortunately, the agency was not discontinued then, or for more than twenty years afterward, but the fact that abandonment was being considered was an augury of things to come. At the end of the nineteenth century the belief was widespread that the Indian problem was nearly solved. Indian wars were a thing of the past, many reservations had been allotted, and the Indians were decreasing in numbers. Government responsibility in the future toward those who remained was thought to be primarily a matter of education. The mass of the American people were busy with other concerns, including their newly acquired overseas empire, and they did not wish to be reminded that Indians still lagged behind the rest of the population in education, in health, and in their economic and social condition. If the Indians were ready to be "turned loose," as a later generation expressed the abdication of public responsibility for their welfare, the Santees should have been as ready as any. This notion probably underlay the talk of closing down the agency. As elsewhere, however, such talk reflected more a wish to be rid of the Indian problem than any actual readiness of the Indians to get along without government help and guidance. Although the most serviceable features of the Santees' culture had been successfully beaten out of them, what had been acquired from the white man's culture was insufficient to compensate for the loss. The residue of the old culture, much of it an economic liability, together with the legacy of more than a half-century of exploitation and robbery by the white man, left the Santees unprepared to confront the twentieth century on a basis of equality with white Americans. ____________________
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:43:00 GMT -5
61 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1895, p. 204; 1898, p. 332 ; Joseph Hollman to D. M. Browning, April 10, 1894, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -197- CHAPTER 10 The Fate of the Upper Sioux WHILE THE main body of the lower Sioux were adjusting to reservation life on the Great Plains, a parallel course was being followed by the upper bands, in a somewhat more northerly setting. In the closing days of the Sioux Uprising, most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons, though largely innocent of participation in the massacres, fled before the advancing military force under General Sibley and scattered over the plains of Dakota Territory. For the next few years they led a nomadic life, wishing to re-establish themselves in the good graces of the white man's government but fearing to give themselves up. Gradually, however, the bulk of them gathered on the Coteau des Prairies, just west of the Lake Traverse--Big Stone Lake area, where in the fall of 1864 the army established Fort Wadsworth, partly for their benefit but chiefly to protect the frontier. Some Dakota politicians, notably Walter A. Burleigh and Governor Newton Edmunds, tried to have them removed to Crow Creek. Failing in this effort, Edmunds, at least, came around finally to advocating that they be given a reservation on the Coteau and restored to treaty relationships with the government. 1 After two inconclusive attempts to negotiate with those bands had been made in 1864 and 1866, Benjamin Thompson, who had been serving with the commission to appraise the former reservation lands in __ 1 Clark W. Thompson to William P. Dole, January 14, 1865; Walter A. Burleigh to Dennis N. Cooley, July 23, 1865; Newton Edmunds to Cooley, August 7, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 180. -198- Minnesota, took the initiative late in the latter year and proposed bringing a hand-picked delegation to Washington to make a treaty. Thompson argued that these people had been friendly in 1862, had saved many white captives, and would prove a useful buffer between the white settlements and the wilder Indians to the west. His recommendation was endorsed by General Sibley, who also urged that Joseph R. Brown be given a role in the negotiations. Commissioner Bogy was sufficiently impressed by his arguments to instruct Thompson to bring a delegation, not to exceed twenty-one men, to Washington in January and to associate himself with Brown in the enterprise. 2 The delegation was brought to Washington as requested and on February 19, 1867, signed a treaty including pretty much the same terms as the one that had been rejected the previous summer. As finally concluded and amended by the Senate, it provided for two reservations, one a wedge-shaped piece of land between Lake Traverse and Fort Wadsworth, its apex at Lake Kampeska (near present Watertown, South Dakota) and its base along, but not parallel to, the later South Dakota-North Dakota boundary. The other reservation, which will be discussed in the next chapter, was a tract extending south from Devils Lake. The most interesting provisions of the treaty were those designed to encourage the civilization of the Sisseton and Wahpeton Sioux. In line with Brown's thinking during his term as Sioux agent, they called for the allotment of the reservations into 160-acre tracts, the owners to receive inalienable patents after five years if they had brought under cultivation at least 50 acres. Furthermore, no goods, provisions, etc., were to be issued except in return for labor performed or produce delivered (the aged and infirm were exempted from this provision), and no trade in furs was to be permitted. Despite Brown's most strenuous efforts, he was unable to incorporate into the treaty a restoration of the tribe's annuities. 3 Certain other provisions, specifying the amount of money to be expended each year for the benefit of the Indians and allowing the payment of traders' debts to a certain sum, were stricken out by the Senate, which chose instead to leave the expenditures to the discretion of the ____ 2 Joseph R. Brown to Dole, January 31, 1864; Benjamin Thompson to Lewis V. Bogy, November 19, 1366; Henry H. Sibley to Alexander Ramsey, December 14, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Cooley to Sibley, March 19 and April 25, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LS; Bogy to Benjamin Thompson, December 20 and 22, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LS; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, pp. 180, 227, 240. 3 J. R. Brown to Bogy, February 4, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR; Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 957-959. -199-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:43:54 GMT -5
Secretary of the Interior and omitted all reference to traders' debts. The treaty thus amended was approved by the Indians on April 22 and proclaimed May 2.4 Signing as head chief of the Sissetons and Wahpetons was Gabriel Renville, nephew of the illustrious Joseph Renville and a relative by marriage of Joseph R. Brown. Scarlet Plume signed as chief of the Sissetons, but most of the other hereditary chiefs, such as Standing Buffalo, were still roaming the prairies and had no share in the treaty. Their nonparticipation, as well as that of several of the leading "farmer Indians" from the old reservation days, was unfortunate in that it caused a split which contributed to the extreme factionalism that later plagued the Sisseton-Wahpeton group. 5 Benjamin Thompson was appointed agent shortly after the treaty was ratified and assumed his duties that summer. Even before his arrival, there had been efforts by the government to aid these Sioux in their farming endeavors. Beginning in 1865 the government had attempted to provide them with hoes and other articles, but some of the purchases never reached them, and grasshoppers and drought rendered their efforts at farming ineffectual. By the fall of 1866 they were in such a state of destitution that they were kept alive only by the timely issuance of some soldiers' rations from Fort Wadsworth that had been condemned as unfit for human consumption. 6 The next spring they received garden and field seeds, which they dutifully planted with the aid of hoes and pointed sticks. Much of the crop was again destroyed by grasshoppers, but they managed to raise 120 bushels of potatoes and 230 bushels of corn. This was not enough to tide them over the winter, however, and once more they hovered on the brink of starvation while efforts to provide them with emergency supplies were hampered by the usual bureaucratic red tape and slowness of communication between Washington and the remote frontier post. Eventually assistance in the form of more condemned rations and some agricultural implements was sent. 7 ____________________ 4 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 958-959; U.S. Statutes at Large, XV, 505-511. 5 U.S. Statutes at Large, XV, 511; Henry B. Whipple to Ely S. Parker, August 24, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 6 C. G. Wykoff, Chief Clerk, Northern Superintendency, to Dole, May 22, 1865; Sibley to Ramsey, December 14, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Colonel S. B. Hayman, commanding at Fort Wadsworth, to Lieutenant Colonel Smith, Acting Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakotah, November 21, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency; Charles H. Mix to Nathaniel G. Taylor, July 10 and August 10, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 7 Mix to N. G. Taylor, July 10, 1867; Benjamin Thompson to N. G. Taylor, March30, 1868 -200- The plight of the upper Sioux was extremely serious at this time. Since one of the objects of making a treaty was to keep them from indiscriminate roving, they were expected to remain on their reservation at all times and ran the risk of being treated as hostile if they strayed outside its boundaries. Because the game in the locality was not nearly enough to supply their needs, they were largely dependent on such provisions as were issued by the commanding officer at Fort Wadsworth or by the designated agents of the Indian Bureau. As other members of their tribe had discovered, however, they had a powerful friend in Bishop Henry B. Whipple, who now argued so eloquently in their behalf that he not only persuaded Congress in 1868 to appropriate $30,000 for their benefit but inadvertently saddled himself with the responsibility of expending the sum. 8 The language of the appropriations act created an awkward situation in which the money to be used for the Indians was not subject to the control of the Indian Bureau, which could do no more than provide Bishop Whipple with suggestions in response to his inquiries. Agent Thompson, who was nominally in charge of the Indians although he spent very little time on the reservation, had no funds at his disposal and repeatedly asked that some be provided out of the proceeds of the sale of the old reservation. Bishop Whipple, who was unable to carry out the terms of the congressional directive in person and who seems not to have wished to entrust the execution of his charge to Thompson, turned over the task of actually purchasing and delivering provisions, clothing, farm implements, and seed for the Indians to his old friend and family physician, Dr. Jared W. Daniels, one-time physician on the old Sioux reservation. When Daniels arrived at Fort Wadsworth in October, 1868, he found the Indians in great need and immediately began issuing a pound of food per day, once a month, plus sugar, coffee, and tobacco to those who paid for it with work. He also provided axes and plows and, to those who had hay, cattle as well. The next spring he started the Indians breaking land, with hoes if necessary, and beginning April 1 he had a farmer visit each dwelling to keep a record of work done. 9 Bishop Whipple himself visited the reservation in the late fall of 1868 ____________________ 30, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1867, p. 245; 1868, pp. 194-195; U.S. Statutes at Large, XV, 217. 8 U.S. Statutes at Large, XV, 217; Whipple to Parker, August 24, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, pp. 326-330. 9 Benjamin Thompson to N. G. Taylor, August 19, 1868; Whipple to Bogy, August 19, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, pp. 320-321. -201-
and was so appalled by the destitution he found that he decided to ignore the provision of the 1867 treaty and issue food and clothing to those in greatest need, without regard to whether they had worked or not. Brown and Thompson both opposed this practice. Thompson complained that These indiscriminate issues, although relieving their necessities at the time, lead to evils by encouraging the idle to hang around the post, and if encouraged will certainly retard if not entirely prevent the success of the auspicious commencement under the treaty on this reservation. It is not to be expected that Indians, any more than white men, will work from choice if they can obtain a living without doing so. . . . 10 An element of professional jealousy may have entered into this criticism, for Thompson was acutely sensitive to the ambiguity of his position and became more so when, in March, 1869, Congress appropriated $60,000 for the Sisseton and Wahpeton Sioux and again placed its disbursement entirely in the hands of Bishop Whipple. The awkwardness was resolved, after a fashion, by the appointment the next month of Daniels as agent, but it was several months before Thompson could be persuaded to turn over the government property to him. 11 Thompson had accomplished some good during his term as agent. He had induced many families to select farms and begin improvements, and he had built houses for 150 families. Handicapped by a lack of funds, he had nevertheless broken about 550 acres of land, including 50 acres plowed by the Indians themselves and a hundred acres broken with hoes. Under Daniels' direction, the work of establishing the upper Sioux on their reservation continued at an accelerated pace. Dissatisfied with Thompson's practice of residing alternately at Fort Wadsworth and in Brown's house at Lake Traverse, he invited the chiefs and headmen to choose an agency site. At the location they selected, about nine miles south of the present town of Sisseton, he had a warehouse, an agency office, a boarding house, and an interpreter's house built, all of logs and costing only $2, 100. By the fall of 1869 about 160 families had taken farms, widely scattered about the reservation.12 ____________________ 10 Whipple to N. G. Taylor, December 10, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, p. 195. 11 U.S. Statutes at Large, XV, 315; N. G. Taylor to Jared W. Daniels, April 22, 1869; Parker to Benjamin Thompson, July 13, 1869; Acting Commissioner W. F. Cady to Whipple, September 25, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LS; Whipple to Parker, August 24, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 12 Benjamin Thompson to N. G. Taylor, December 23, 1868, and April 12, 1869; -202-
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: * The number of Indians on the reservation, variously estimated at the time of the treaty, fluctuated considerably in the early years. Thompson reported a population of 1,637 in 1868, but the next year he counted only 1,164. Daniels found 1,498 in 1870, and there were just two fewer in 1872. By the next year the number had increased to 1,540 and in 1874 to 1,677.13 The probability is that people kept drifting in from the plains as the news reached them that they need not remain pariahs any longer. As fast as they arrived, they were encouraged to take up farms, send their children to school, and generally accommodate themselves to the government's beneficent intentions. In their slow progress toward civilization the Sissetons and Wahpetons were subjected to the influence of missionaries almost from the beginning of their life on the new reservation. Stephen R. Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson, who had been their spiritual mentors on the old reservation, promptly took up the work again in the new location. The Indians themselves, some of them ordained ministers, played an active part in re-establishing the missionary activity. After holding services in homes for some time, Daniel Renville and a number of others early in 1869 petitioned Agent Thompson for assistance in building a church. In the summer of 1870, Riggs began building a church and school to be named "Good Will." When Gabriel Renville questioned his authority to build, he wrote to the Interior Department for instructions. Although ordered to suspend operations until it was decided which denomination was to have charge of the agency, he went ahead with the building and later received authorization to do so. Daniel Renville became pastor of the church, and late in the fall of 1870 a school was opened under the direction of Wyllys K. Morris, Riggs' son-in-law. As on the old reservation, teaching was conducted in both English and Dakota. Another church was built at Ascension and John B. Renville, a native clergyman, placed in charge. 14 Thereafter mission work grew year by year, even though Williamson remained only a short time and Riggs spent only the summer months at Sisseton. All significant missionary activity among the upper Sioux, both ____________________ Benjamin Thompson to Parker, June 30, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, pp. 321-323. 13 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, p. 194; 1869, p. 324; 1870, p. 225; 1873, p. 226; 1872, p. 255; 1874, p. 254. Daniels counted 1,613 in 1869, but 321 of those belonged at Devils Lake. Still, his figure is substantially higher than Thompson's. 14 Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), pp. 254, 258-259, 261-263; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, pp. 322, 325. -203- before the uprising and afterward, had been conducted by the American Board, which was at that time under Presbyterian control. Hence it was natural that when President Grant distributed the various agencies among the different denominations, the Sisseton agency should come under the control of the American Board. Daniels was an Episcopalian, and although he was well liked by the Indians and apparently effective as an agent, control of the agency by the American Board necessitated his replacement by a Presbyterian. The man selected for the post was Moses N. Adams, who had been a missionary at Traverse des Sioux before the treaties of 1851. The choice was an unfortunate one from the standpoint of harmony on the reservation, for it exacerbated the factionalism already existing and led to a period of nearly continuous strife between the opposing forces. From Adams' arrival at the agency in December, 1871, until his departure in 1875, charges and countercharges were exchanged, and there was acute dissatisfaction leading on occasion to violence, which in turn resulted in retaliation by the agent. Because this period of contention almost certainly contributed to the ultimate failure of the civilizing experiment at Sisseton, it warrants more attention than such squabbles usually do. The conflict was between the "church party," made up of those Indians who had been most strongly under missionary influence on the old reservation and who often surpassed their teachers in moralistic rigidity, and the "scout party," headed by Gabriel Renville, who preserved many of the "heathen" customs, such as polygamy and dancing, and paid little attention to Christian observances. The dichotomy was not simply between civilization and anti-civilization factions, for Renville and some of his followers were the most progressive farmers on the reservation, and they accused some of the ministers belonging to the other group of devoting so much time to their spiritual duties that they neglected their farms. Generally, however, the least progressive members of the tribe tended to side with Renville in his disputes with the agent, with the result that he was tarred with the same brush so far as Adams was concerned. 15 Shortly after Adams took over as agent, the chiefs and headmen charged in a petition that he had made indiscriminate issues of supplies instead of adhering to the terms of the treaty and had thereby weakened the incentive to labor which the treaty had been intended to provide. ____________________ 15 Everett W. Sterling, "Moses N. Adams: A Missionary as Indian Agent," Minnesota History, XXXV ( December 1956), 167-168; Gabriel Renville, et al., to Sibley, May 2, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. -204-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:46:38 GMT -5
They accused him of conspiring with Riggs to "feed their flock of idlers," i.e., the native ministers, who were of course expected to farm like their parishioners. Adams dismissed the charges as reflecting personal animosity toward him. Matters took a more serious turn late in 1873, when a self-constituted police force tried to drive two native ministers off the reservation by seizing their oxen, wagons, plows, and other equipment issued by the government and turning these items over to the agency for reissue to more deserving members of the tribe. With assistance reluctantly provided by the garrison at Fort Wadsworth, Adams took two of the leaders into custody and then removed Gabriel Renville, the two culprits, and another man from the "executive board" that he had set up, and replaced them with members of the church faction. 16 Apparently thinking the battle won, Adams then proposed a new system of government for the reservation. The rules and regulations included in his plan reveal much about the man's mentality and the attitude with which he approached his duties as Indian agent. One stipulation was that "ample provision should be made for them . . . guaranteeing to each one protection in the liberty to worship and serve God, according to the dictates of his own conscience." But this expression of religious freedom was followed immediately by the sentence "All idolatrous and pagan worship and service should be forbidden with suitable penalty attached." When he had been on the job less than a year, Adams wrote the commissioner that changing the Indians' ways would be difficult, "for in all the work of educating and elevating this people, socially and morally, we encounter their native and peculiar habits; their ignorance and prejudice, and their amazing slowness to believe and do what is right." 17 Adams' stern measures did not silence the discontent of the scout party, who got up another petition and finally brought about an investigation of affairs at the agency in 1874. The upshot was the formal censure of the agent, who had by this time alienated even Riggs by his autocratic and sometimes violent methods. Before his replacement in the spring of 1875, Adams got in a few Parthian shots, accusing the ____ 16 Chiefs and Head Men to Great Father, February 7, 1872; Moses N. Adams to Commissioner Francis A. Walker, April 3,1872; Adams to Edward P. Smith, December 15, 17, 18, 23, and 26, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Sterling, "Moses N. Adams: A Missionary as Indian Agent," pp. 171-173. 17 Adams to E. P. Smith, January 28, 1874; Adams to Walker, April 3, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Sterling, "Moses N. Adams: A Missionary as Indian Agent," pp. 169-170. -205- government inspector, E. C. Kemble, of having "covered the Cross of Christ with shame among the pagan portion of this people" by saying that the agent was not there as a minister and should not interfere with the feasting and dancing. Kemble had called the scout party "the most industrious, enterprising and prosperous members of the tribe" (which they probably were); Adams replied, irrelevantly, that they were "largely pagans, polygamists, bigamists and drummers who, almost to a man, retain many of their old heathen habits and customs." 18 Despite the contention between rival factions during Adams' tenure as agent, some progress was made on the reservation, notably in education. As early as 1869 four buildings erected by the Indians were in use as schools. Although Adams doubted the value of such scattered institutions and wanted a manual labor school, he had to be content with day schools for his first two years as agent. By the fall of 1872 two brick schools were completed to house classes previously conducted in homes and churches, and soon afterward the church building at Ascension was taken over by the government as a school. Two more district schools were built in 1874. These schools seem not to have been very successful in their early years. Adams' successor, John G. Hamilton, remarked of the educational system on the reservation that "results are hardly commensurate with the amount of money expended." Dissenting from Adams' view that all five of the schools should be taught the year around, he operated them for only four and a half months. Later they were largely abandoned because of irregular and unsatisfactory attendance and general indifference on the part of the Indians. Daniels had observed much earlier that the novelty of school wore off after about two months. 19 Adams wanted a central institution to train native teachers for the outlying schools, much as Santee Normal Training School was doing. His first request was turned down by the Indian Bureau, but in 1873 he was authorized to begin construction on a manual labor school. Although not entirely finished, it was opened that fall with an enrollment of eighteen girls. It was a small operation for a number of years, kept ____ 18 Adams to E. P. Smith, February 14, 1874, and March 20, 1875; Dr. George H. Hawes to E. P. Smith, November 2, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Sterling, "Moses N. Adams: A Missionary as Indian Agent," p. 175. 19 Adams to Walker, February 26 and May 18, 1872, and January 24, 1873; Adams to E. P. Smith, March 29, 1873; John G. Hamilton to E. P. Smith, June 23, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, p. 321; 1871, p. 531; 1872, p. 256; 1873, p. 226; 1874, p. 256; 1875, p. 252; 1876, p. 37; 1878, pp. 41-42. -206- open for only nine months a year during Hamilton's term of office. 20 Besides the government schools, the Sissetons also had the facilities of one or more mission schools, which, though they never acquired the importance of those at Santee, supplemented the government schools for a time. In 1876, for example, the mission school was in session longer than the district schools, and two years later both the Good Will and the Ascension mission schools were in operation for ten months. In that year the American Board spent $2,510 for its work on the Sisseton Reservation. 21 When the Sisseton Reservation was established, the land surrounding it was as yet unceded by the Indians. Although their claim to some eight million acres in the eastern part of Dakota Territory was considered somewhat shadowy, the language of the 1867 treaty implied that such a claim existed. As the tide of settlement began to sweep into the area, pressure for its cession grew, until in 1872 Congress instructed the Secretary of the Interior to examine and report on any claim the Sissetons and Wahpetons might have to that region and, if their claim was found to be valid, what compensation, if any, should be made to them for the extinguishment of their title. Agents Adams and William Forbes, of the Devils Lake Reservation, and James Smith were appointed commissioners to investigate the matter. Their instructions specified that, although the act of Congress contemplated payment, because these lands were "not only of no advantage to the Indians, but positively mischievous, as tending to keep alive their savage habits and traditions, the consideration if any thus to be paid ought to be very moderate." The consent of the Indians was not required, but it was deemed expedient that they should voluntarily and freely accept relinquishment of their claim. 22 The council held with the chiefs and headmen of the Sissetons and Wahpetons was not altogether a love feast, but the Indians had learned by then that whatever terms the white man chose to offer them might as well be accepted. Hence they put up only token opposition to the offer of ten cents an acre, to be paid in ten annual installments of &80,000 each. Smith pretended that this sum was really more than the lands were worth to the Indians, but Adams and Forbes more frankly advised ____
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:47:08 GMT -5
20 Adams to Walker, February 26, 1872, and January 24 and March 29, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 256; 1873, p. 226; 1874, p. 256; 1876, p. 37. 21 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1876, p. 37; 1878, pp. 41, 43. 22 U.S. Statutes at Large, XVII, 281; Walker to William Forbes and Adams, July 19, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. -207- the Indians to accept it as the best they could get. The agreement signed in September, 1872, contained nine paragraphs, of which Congress later struck out all but the first two, which provided for the cession and the amount of compensation. These sweeping amendments were agreed to as a matter of course in May, 1873, and the last claims of the Sisseton-WahpetonSioux, except for the two reservations, were done away with for a ridiculously low price. 23 About the most that could be said for the agreement was that it provided, for the next ten years, a badly needed source of revenue for the Indians. The treaty of 1867 had been, in its amended form, deliberately vague as to the amount of money to be expended for these people, and appropriations were always subject to the exigencies of the budget. Following the panic of 1873, for example, appropriations for the Indian Service generally were cut drastically. Theoretically the Sissetons and Wahpetons were entitled to benefits from the sale of the old reservation in Minnesota, but the sums realized from that source were usually tied up in one way or another so that practically none of the money reached the Indians until the 1890's. Hence the pittance they received for the cession of their lands in eastern Dakota gave their agent something to work with for a decade, at the end of which time they were expected to have become entirely self-supporting. Although the Sissetons had begun locating on farms during Thompson's term as agent, no thoroughgoing survey of the reservation was made at that time. Consequently people had settled pretty much where they pleased, without regard to whether their farms were susceptible to description in the customary surveyor's terms. By 1874, "all sorts of difficulties had grown out of local contentions about timber, land, &c," as Adams commented. The next year C. C. Royce was sent out by the Interior Department to survey the Indians' claims preparatory to issuing certificates of allotment. Royce also found "numerous and very vexatious disputes" among the Indians as to the boundaries of their claims. In many cases they had settled too close together to permit the assignment of, 160-acre tracts to each family without requiring some to move. 24 ____ 23 Proceedings of Council, September 18, 1872; Adams to Walker, September 19, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, pp. 118-123; U.S. Statutes at Large, XVIII, 167. 24 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 257; 1875, p. 253; Secretary of Interior Columbus Delano to E. P. Smith, April 23 and May 10, 1875; C. C. Royce to E. P. Smith, June 14 and September 25, 1875; Acting Secretary of Interior B. R. Cowen to E. P. Smith, October 1, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. -208- In making the allotments Royce was guided by a principle necessitated by the nature of the country embraced in the reservation. Most of the timber, highly prized by the Indians, was located in the coulees along the eastern slope of the Coteau, whereas the best farm land lay well to the east, beyond a rather sterile strip at the base of the Coteau. Thompson had recognized this problem and in 1868 had recommended that each family be given forty acres of timber in one piece and the remainder of his quarter section in another tract. Royce followed that principle in making the allotments in 1875, with the result that most of the Indians had two pieces of land, rather widely separated. If the homesteads had been situated on the tracts of good agricultural land, no difficulty would have ensued; but the Indians, regarding the availability of timber more highly than the quality of the soil, had settled mostly in the coulees. Years later, when they had received patents, they found it convenient to lease their farmland and practice a kind of subsistence agriculture on the remote timber claims where they lived.25 Despite a rapid turnover in agents and slow progress in farming, life on the Sisseton Reservation during the 1870's had an appearance of stability. In accordance with the terms of the 1867 treaty, rations, clothing, stock, and farm implements were issued only in return for labor performed. The labor might include hauling supplies from the nearest railroad terminus ( Morris, Minnesota, until 1876, when a road was surveyed to Herman, a few miles nearer) or construction work around the agency, but there was not enough work of this kind for the number of men who needed to draw rations. Consequently, the practice was adopted early and long continued of including work on one's own claim. The men were paid, not in cash but in credit, at a rate comparable to the going rate for labor outside the reservation. Breaking new sod was worth five dollars an acre, ordinary plowing, three dollars an acre. The transportation of supplies by ox team from Herman paid twenty dollars. 26 Keeping track of the amount of work done by each man involved a tremendous amount of bookkeeping on the part of the agent and his clerk. An account of every man's work was kept in a set of "Indian ____ 26 Benjamin Thompson to N. G. Taylor, July 11, 1868; Royce to E. P. Smith, September 25, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1900, p. 385. 26 Hamilton to John Q. Smith, February 14, May 15, and July 28, 1876; Edward H. C. Hooper to Ezra A. Hayt, May 13, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, p. 532; 1870, p. 226. -209- books"; the transactions covered an average of over 250 pages of ordinary ten-quire journal pages. Goods were issued by the storekeeper on requisitions signed by the agent or the clerk. The storekeeper kept a ledger showing the amount of goods received and issued and posted it weekly. Supplies were issued monthly in this fashion to more than four hundred individuals. In addition, Indians whose credit was notably good or who brought in produce for sale were allowed to draw on the warehouse at any time, even though this procedure placed an additional burden on the storekeeper. Ironically, the further the Indians advanced--that is, the more labor they performed--the more work devolved upon the agency employees. Issuing weekly rations to "wild" Indians at the agencies west of the Missouri was relatively simple compared to the task at Sisseton. 27 There were a good many Indians, of course, who contributed little or nothing to their own support. These people, who constituted the "poor list" as distinguished from the "working list," made up a remarkably large proportion of the tribe. In 1872, for example, they numbered 660 out of a total of 1,496. Some of them were doing a little farming, but many were the elderly, the infirm, and the incompetent. During the decade their numbers diminished, as more and more families located on farms and thus qualified for inclusion on the "working list." 28 In many respects, the history of the Sisseton Reservation during the last three decades of the nineteenth century parallels that of the Santee Reservation. At both places efforts were made to render the Indians economically self-sufficient, and on both reservations those efforts were hampered by drought and grasshopper plagues, by the Indians' uneven co-operation with their agents, and by the uncertainty and instability of the government's policy toward them. Some circumstances at Sisseton were peculiar to that reservation, however. Because the reservation was nearly nine times the size of the Santee Reservation as finally constituted, the Indians were scattered more widely and the agents had more difficulty keeping track of them. Located as it was in country not yet settled, it did not for several years include all the Indians nominally attached to the agency. Some continued to plant on Big Stone Lake, with the tacit permission of the agent, until at least 1870; another band, who practiced little or no agriculture, remained west of the reservation until the death of their chief, Big Eagle Feather, in 1873; still another ____
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:47:37 GMT -5
27 Hamilton to J. Q. Smith, February 14, 1876, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 28 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, pp. 255-256; 1875, p. 251. -210- group lingered around Fort Ransom, on the Sheyenne River, for two or three years before they were persuaded to join their tribesmen on the reservation. 29 As at Santee, there was a steady increase in the number of agency buildings and Indian houses during the 1870's and 1880's. Daniels and Adams had operated with primitive facilities--log buildings of various sizes--but their successors replaced the more vital of these with better structures. A brick warehouse, in which the agent's office was located, was built in the later seventies. A steam-operated saw- and gristmill served the area surrounding the agency, though later, as towns grew up around the reservation, many of the Indians found it more convenient to haul their grain to mills in those towns and were given passes for that purpose. As late as 1875 a substantial number of the Indians were still living in tipis, but then a campaign was initiated to provide a log house for each family. Frame houses were not common until much later, and most families kept a tipi for occasional use in the summer even after they had made the transition to log houses as permanent residences. 30 The attempt to train Indian apprentices to do the agency work was not as successful as at Santee, partly because a large proportion of the industrious men were farming and partly, it would seem, because some of the agents used their position to employ their relatives. Adams, in defending himself against Inspector Kemble's unfavorable report, said that most of the Indians who were not farming were unstable and unreliable and hence unsatisfactory as apprentices. Nevertheless, he employed an Indian as apprentice to the agency carpenter, and two were then working with the miller and learning his trade. In time, the apprentice system became an anachronism, and the Indians asked to be paid as hired help on the same basis as irregular employees hired from outside the reservation. 31 The employment of Indians as teamsters was not wholly successful, for some fell into temptation when at Morris to pick up supplies and became drunk; one agent recommended that supplies be brought in by a contractor. In 1879 the agent tried the __ 29 Ibid., 1867, p. 245; 1868, p. 193; 1869, p. 321; 1871, p. 532; 1873, p. 226; 1874, p. 255; Captain L. M. Kellogg, commanding at Fort Ransom, to Horace Capron, Commissioner of Agriculture, July 5, 1869; Daniels to Sibley, November 30, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 30 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, p. 321; 1872, pp. 255, 257; 1878, p. 40; 1890, p. 67; Hamilton to E. P. Smith, December 1, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 31 Adams to E. P. Smith, January 8, 1875; Charles Crissey to Hayt, August 26, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. -211- experiment of replacing the white farmer with ten Indians, whom he placed in different parts of the reservation to instruct their fellows in agriculture and aid the agent in keeping tabs on affairs in the outlying areas. This innovation worked for a time but fell into disuse under a later agent. 32 In the later seventies the Indians became increasingly independent in their behavior, if not in their economic condition. Those who left the reservation to have their wheat and corn ground at mills in nearby towns often sold a part of their grain or other produce for cash, with which they began making small purchases. About 1878 they began buying harvesters and other farm machinery, signing notes for them and paying for them out of the next crop. By 1880 ten reapers and ten fanning mills had been bought in this manner. 33 Their doing business in neighboring towns was a natural development in the assimilation process, but it caused stresses and strains in the somewhat rigid system evolved from the provisions of the 1867 treaty. By the end of the seventies the Indians could no longer earn enough by labor to buy the household articles and clothing they needed, and the prices paid for produce at the agency were well below those paid in off-reservation areas. By 1880 the pass system was clearly anachronistic at Sisseton, as the agent pointed out to the commissioner in requesting a relaxation of the policy. He admitted that some who left the reservation got drunk but pointed out: "The fact still presents itself, if this people are to become all the Dept is trying to make them, they must meet temptation and learn sooner or later, what our civilization is, by contact with it in neighboring towns." The Indian Office responded by issuing an order to the effect that men holding patents to their land need no longer carry passes. Since only two had thus far met the fifty-acre requirement, this ruling had practically no effect. 34 As might have been expected, many of the Indians were leaving the reservation without passes, not always on legitimate business. In 1879 there was a flurry of excitement over the discovery that some had been cutting timber on the reservation and selling it, at prices well above those paid at the agency, to the contractor supplying wood to Fort Sis- ___
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:47:58 GMT -5
32 Hamilton to J. Q. Smith, May 15, 1876; Crissey to Hayt, July 8, 1879, ibid. 33 Hamilton to J. Q. Smith, March 14, 1876; Crissey to Hayt, August 26, 1879, and February 27, 1880, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 41. 34 Crissey to Hayt, August 26, 1879, and February 27, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. -212- seton, as Fort Wadsworth had been renamed in 1876. The practice seems to have been stopped with the co-operation of the commanding officer, but with the settling up of the surrounding country, the Indians found a ready market for wood smuggled from the reservation and for the oxen that had been issued to them. Their usual practice was to trade the oxen for horses or else sell them and buy horses or ponies. The absence of any single authority such as existed at the fort made it impossible to put a stop to this illegal trade. The introduction of whiskey among the Indians became a more serious problem in 1880, with the sudden development of the town of Browns Valley that year. The agent complained that it was impossible to obtain witnesses or to get the Indians to tell where they were buying the liquor. 35 As at Santee, there was at Sisseton a gradual discontinuance of rations as the Indians approached self-sufficiency. The series of grasshopper plagues ended in 1877, and the next year a good crop was raised. Charles Crissey, who became agent in 1879, decided that the time was ripe for some major moves toward self-support. In the spring of 1880 only those who began farming that year were issued seed wheat; the rest used seed saved from the previous year. By the end of that growing season, only one-fourth of the Indians' subsistence was being provided by the government. Great quantities of farm machinery were being purchased by the Indians then, and more than four hundred cows were issued the following year, most of which were cared for by the farmers who received them. 36 The process of achieving self-support in food was hastened in April, 1882, by the burning of the warehouse. No subsistence supplies were issued after that date except for school children, apprentices, and the police force. In September, Agent Crissey reported: "After five months trial of a lesson, which, probably, is as hard a one as this people has ever been called upon to learn, and harder than any they will ever be obliged to learn in the future, I can safely say that the question of self-support of this people is forever settled." 37 His prediction was a trifle too sanguine, as was the statement of Benjamin Thompson, who returned as agent in 1884, that the Sissetons were "entirely self-supporting," but for several years they did provide their own ____
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:48:26 GMT -5
35 Acting Commissioner E. J. Brooks to Secretary of Interior Carl Schurz, September 12, 1879; Crissey to Hayt, February 27, 1880; Crissey to Roland E. Trowbridge, August 4 and October 13, 1880, ibid. 36 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1879, p. 44; 1880, p. 49; 1881, p. 56; 1882, pp. 41-42. 37 Ibid., 1882, p. 43. -213- subsistence and appeared to be progressing rapidly toward the goal the Indian Office had set for them. 38 In some respects the parallels between Santee and Sisseton during the later nineteenth century are so close that the story of one reservation is the story of the other. On both reservations all the agents made sporadic efforts to stamp out "heathen" practices such as the old dances, but somehow they never achieved complete success. Soon after one agent had reported that the dances were virtually extinct, his successor would discover that they were reviving. In this campaign the agents were always assured of the co-operation of the missions, whose career at Sisseton much resembled that of the missions at Santee. During the period when Indian agencies were parceled out among religious denominations, the American Board had a monopoly on religious activities at Sisseton, but in 1881 an Episcopal mission was established by Bishop Hare. By 1883 the Episcopalians had two outstations in addition to their church at the agency. In subsequent years they expanded their activities until their membership at least equaled that of the Presbyterians. 39
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:48:50 GMT -5
The manual labor boarding school followed a course much like that of the comparable institution at Santee, though without the spectacular misfortunes that marked the history of the latter. After a slow start in the seventies, it grew rapidly in the next decade, until it became too small for the needs of the reservation. Late in 1883 an addition costing more than &10,000
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:49:15 GMT -5
was put into use, and the school was soon enjoying an average attendance of nearly one hundred. Its enrollment fluctuated toward the end of the century, as the reservation was opened to white settlement and country schools began dotting the landscape. Some $7,000 was spent for another addition to the school in 1891, but mismanagement in the following years, coupled with substantial cash payments to the Indians, which had the same demoralizing effect as at Santee, tended to keep the enrollment from expanding in proportion to the population growth and educational needs of the reservation. 40 One of the more striking parallels between Sisseton and Santee was that each spawned an offshoot colony. In 1875 some twenty-five families belonging to the church party, who feared that Adams' removal would leave them at the mercy of the other faction, fled the res- ___ 38 Ibid., 1884, p. 49. 39 Ibid., 1881, p. 56; 1883, p. 46. 40 Ibid., 1883, p. 45; 1884, p. 50; 1885, p. 48; 1889, p. 164; 1891, pp. 419-420; 1895, p. 301. -214-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:50:25 GMT -5
ervation and took up homesteads about forty miles to the southeast. Although Agent Hamilton at first seized the issue oxen and farm implements they had taken with them, the missionaries later induced the Interior Department to replace those items and to give the Brown Earth colony, as it was called, other assistance in the way of seed, farm animals, and machinery. A school was built in 1880, with government support, and operated, unsuccessfully, until 1884. Led by the native minister, Daniel Renville, the Brown Earth people built themselves a log church in the second year of their self-exile from the reservation. 41 The Brown Earth colony did not acquire the permanence of Flandreau, however, perhaps because the enterprise was ill-conceived by its initiators and insufficiently aided by the government. Although many of the colonists filed for homesteads, they do not seem to have been able to make the improvements necessary to meet the existing requirements. When Thompson investigated the colony in 1884, he found that few had more than five acres broken, and most were living by fishing, hunting, trapping, and selling wood to the neighboring whites. When the Sisseton Reservation was allotted under the provisions of the Dawes Act, most of these people returned to the reservation and took farms there. A few wanted nothing further to do with reservations, however, and migrated to Minnesota, where they formed the nucleus of the present Upper Sioux community near Granite Falls. 42 If the Brown Earth experiment had ended in failure, it had none the less taught the participants something about the pitfalls of independence and may possibly have prepared them for the trials that the whole tribe underwent following allotment. Allotment was the biggest event on the Sisseton Reservation during the last two decades of the century. Sisseton was one of the earliest reservations to be allotted, and today it serves as the classic example of the evils of allotment. Because of the fifty-acre requirement in the 1867 treaty, the issuance of patents proceeded very slowly after the survey of farms carried out by Royce in 1875. Gabriel Renville received a patent almost at once, and Charles Crawford, like Renville a mixed-blood, ____________________ 41 Hamilton to E. P. Smith, June 21, 1875; Daniel to J. Q. Smith, April 9, 1877; Stephen R. Riggs to Hayt, November 19, 1877; Hooper to Hayt, June 4, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 43. 42 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 43; 1880, p. 50; 1884, pp. 50-52; 1885, p. 50; Sterling, "Moses N. Adams: A Missionary as Indian Agent," p. 177; James W. Balmer to Commissioner John Collier, November 7, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency (enclosing "Historical Data of Early Settlement of Upper Sioux Indian Community"). -215- followed within a few months. After that, however, only one more was issued until 1883, when nine were issued. As late as 1886 the agent reported that a total of only thirty-three patents had been issued, mostly to older men. 43 At that rate it would have taken many decades for all the Sissetons to become landowners, and white settlers were clamoring to have the reservation opened. Although the Sissetons had petitioned Congress in 1884 to be recognized as a civilized tribe and given the privileges granted the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, no action was taken until February 8, 1887, when the Dawes Act became law. It authorized the President to order allotment of any reservation when, in his opinion, the Indians were ready to take on the responsibilities of citizenship. Since the Sissetons were by this time largely self-supporting and were living under a fairly complex system of reservation government, it was natural for their reservation to be chosen as one of the first to undergo the experiment. The former Santee agent, Isaiah Lightner, went to Sisseton in the summer of 1887 and began making the allotments called for. Completion of the job required two years, at the end of which time 1,971 allotments had been made and 1,341 patents issued. 44 Once allotment had been carried out, the next step was to arrange for the opening of the reservation. Here as elsewhere, the supposition was that no additional lands would ever be needed by the Indians. When the proposition to sell part of the reservation had been broached in 1884, the Indians had stoutly opposed it; but in November, 1889, when a commission met with the governing body of the tribe, they agreed without much discussion. The agreement signed December 12, 1889, provided that the unallotted lands should be sold at $2.50 per acre, the money to be held at 3 per cent interest and used by Congress for the "education and civilization" of the Indians, as provided by the Dawes Act. Together with other matters relating to the Sissetons, this agreement was ratified by Congress and became law on March 3, 1891. A proclamation was issued the next month opening the reservation to settlement. Of the original 918,770.58 acres, 310,711.06 had been allotted, 34,187.26 were reserved for agency, school, and church purposes, and the remaining 573,872.26 acres were made available for purchase by white settlers. As at Santee several years earlier, the houses of white ____________________ 43 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 46; 1885, p. 49; 1886, p. 86. 44 U.S. Statutes at Large, XXIV, 388-391; D'Arcy McNickle, "Rescuing Sisseton," The American Indian, III (Spring 1946), 23; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1887, p. 47; 1888, p. 56; 1889, p. 16.
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:50:54 GMT -5
-216- pioneers soon dotted the prairies in every direction. Railroads had begun building through the reservation in 1880, and now towns sprang up at various points. 45 The effects of allotment were much the same as at Santee. There was an immediate decline in farming activities among the Indians and a corresponding rise in the practice of leasing to white operators. Coming on the heels of drought in the later 1880's, these developments produced an abrupt halt in the civilizing process and a partial retrogression to an earlier stage. As early as 1889 the agent reported that his Indians would need assistance during the coming winter; and in 1891, $5,000 was spent up to April 1 for pork, flour, beef, and beans for the "destitute and starving." School attendance fell off markedly during this period, too, though the hope of obtaining rations induced some children to return to school with the coming of winter. 46 All these evidences of decline were not due solely to allotment, however, for the Sissetons, like the Santees in the same period, received large cash payments during the early nineties. The agreement signed in December, 1889, also provided for the payment of $342,778.37 in back annuities to members of the tribe who had served as scouts with the United States Army during the Indian wars. This was calculated to be the amount that they would have received between July 1, 1862, and July 1, 1888, if their annuities had not been cut off by the act of February 16, 1863. The scouts (or their heirs) were also to be paid &18,400 annually from July 1, 1888, to July 1, 1901, the date on which the treaty of Traverse des Sioux would have expired. These provisions were incorporated into the Indian appropriations act of March 3, 1891, and payment was made in July. Although up to then two traders were scarcely making a living on the reservation, after that date three did a lively business as long as the money lasted. 47 Together with the payment for the ceded lands, this money had much the same effect on the Indians as at Santee. Whiskey was relatively easy ____________________ 45 Com.of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1884, p. 51; 1890, p. 65; 1891, pp. 664-665; 1892, pp. 469, 728-729, 81; 1888, p. li. The figures on acreage are from the general report for 1892. The Sisseton agent in 1895 offered a somewhat different breakdown. According to him, 316,907 acres were retained by the Indians, including only 1,187 acres for agency, schools, and churches; 601,873 acres were thrown open for settlement. The early stages in the attempt to negotiate for a right of way for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railway are treated in 48th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 71. 46 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1889, p. 163; 1890, pp. 66, 69; 1891, p. 420. 47 Ibid., 1891, pp. 421, 664-665; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I, 430431, 485. -217- to obtain now that white settlers were everywhere and towns had sprung up; the agent reported in the fall of 1891 that the agency jail had been well filled for a time after the payment of annuities. The death of Gabriel Renville in August, 1892, removed an influence which, despite the attacks of Agent Adams and others, had been prevailingly good. Conditions were so bad that year that the agent, D. T. Hindman, resigned his job after only three or four months of duty. Captain George W. H. Smith, who served as acting agent the next year, was disillusioned by what he saw at Sisseton. Although the Indians there had received more advantages than most Indians, he thought, they were not as far advanced as they should have been. Contrary to what he had supposed before coming to the agency, only a few were self-supporting; most depended entirely on the per capita payments. Fewer than half the eligible children were in school. Although there had been a "fair" crop that year, drought returned again in 1894 and brought an almost total loss of crops and vegetables. 48 The Sisseton population grew rapidly during the years of cash payments. From 1,520 in 1887 the number rose to 1,730 in 1891 and 1,863 in 1895. Since most of this increase came after the allotments had been made, the additional members of the tribe had no land of their own. Neither they nor the more fortunate members of the tribe were living under conditions much better than they had enjoyed years before. In 1890 there were on the reservation 77 frame houses, 22 log houses with shingle roofs, and 103 log houses with dirt roofs. Not all of them were occupied at one time; some of the frame houses were vacant during cold weather, and some of the log houses were unoccupied during warm weather. Tipis were still popular in summer, when the houses were used for storage. 49 Citizenship brought with it new problems at Sisseton as elsewhere. The tax-exempt status of Indian land created ill feeling among the white population and made for difficulties in punishing Indian offenders in local courts. So far as civil actions were concerned, the Indians had no money for litigation and tended to go to the agent with their problems, as they had done before allotment. Many of them proceeded on the assumption that citizenship conveyed the right to buy and consume alcohol. In 1895 all but eleven of sixty-two arrests made by the agency police were for assault and disorderly conduct while under the ____________________ 48 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1891, p. 420; 1892, pp. 469, 471; 1893, pp. 303-305; 1894, p 302. 49 Ibid., 1887, p. 45; 1891, p. 419; 1890, p. 67; 1895, p. 302. -
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:51:50 GMT -5
218- influence of liquor. The next year all but nine of forty-three arrests were for similar causes. That year an Indian woman was shot and killed in Browns Valley by another Indian, who was tried in the Minnesota courts and sentenced to the state penitentiary at Stillwater. In 1899 the agent reported that six deaths that year were traceable to drinking. Prosecution of whiskey dealers in the last years of the century resulted in some decrease in the liquor trade, but the problem lingered on into the twentieth century. 50 The outlook at the end of the century was even less promising at Sisseton than at Santee. When in 1898 and 1899 a total of $304,000 was paid out over a twelve-month period, the agent reported that only half the Indians had used it wisely. The other half wanted the agency abolished and their lands deeded to them without restrictions, presumably so that they could sell them and use the proceeds as they had their recent payments. In 1900 most of the older Sissetons were living on their forty-acre tracts in the coulees and leasing the rest of their allotments. The distance of their good lands from their homes, the lack of large horses, and the shortage of machinery and grain were cited as reasons for leasing. Most of them were so heavily in debt for what they did own that they dared not appear in town with good horses. At least half the Sissetons were then living entirely on the income from the leases and on the interest on their annuities. The agent thought that the money remaining to their credit should be paid to them so that they could liquidate their debts. As if this were not enough, drought that year had reduced the crop to a third of what it had been in better years. 51 Thus the history of the Sisseton Reservation in the late nineteenth century followed much the same pattern as Santee: a brave beginning, with considerable enthusiasm among both Indians and agents, followed by gradual progress toward self-sufficiency, culminating in allotment, which proved to be not the crowning achievement of the process as intended, but actually a disaster for the Indians, succeeded by deterioration and a return to poverty. This time, however, the sense of urgency and the idealism that had characterized thinking on the Indian question in the 1860's and 1870's were gone, replaced by a widespread wish to ignore the whole problem, now that the government had done all it could to help the Indian. So the Sissetons, like their Santee cousins, faced the twentieth century unequipped to meet the challenges it presented. ____________________ 50 Ibid., 1890, p. 66; 1895, pp. 301-302; 1896, p. 301; 1899, p. 346. 51 Ibid., 1899, p. 346; 1900, pp. 385-386. -219- CHAPTER 11 The Devils Lake Reservation THE TREATY of 1867 with the upper Sioux provided for a reservation between Devils Lake and the Sheyenne River, chiefly for those Santees who were still fugitives on the plains but also for the Cuthead bands of Yanktonais who claimed that area. When five hundred Indians had gathered there, an agent was to be appointed for them. Four years passed before this provision was complied with, and in the meantime the Indians who resided in the vicinity were largely under the supervision of the commanding officer of Fort Totten, established in 1867 on the south shore of Devils Lake. 1 In the fall of that year 57 lodges--some 250 souls--were said to be living permanently there, and more were expected during the winter. Later reports mentioned 80 and even 130 lodges; the Indians were all in "great destitution" by December, when efforts were made to subsist them out of military stores. Those efforts failing, Sisseton Agent Benjamin Thompson arranged with Joseph R. Brown to supply a limited amount of provisions, to be paid for when an appropriation was made by Congress. Justus C. Ramsey, brother of the former Minnesota governor, was designated to receive the supplies from Brown, accompany them to Devils Lake, and there distribute them to the Indians. The mission, carried out in mid-winter under conditions of extreme hardship, kept life in the Indians till spring. 2 ______ 1 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 957-958. 2 Benjamin Thompson to Nathaniel G. Taylor, October 17, November 29, and -220- Although it may be supposed that humanitarian considerations were uppermost in the minds of those who arranged for this emergency relief shipment, there were other reasons for making a gesture in behalf of the Indians at Devils Lake. Charles A. Ruffee, who was then engaged in establishing an overland mail route across present-day North Dakota, received reports from his agent at Devils Lake that the Indians there and on the Mouse (Souris) River were "positively in a starving condition" and had eaten their horses and those of the mail carriers. There were also a number of Santee Sioux on the Missouri River 150 miles west of Fort Buford who were waiting to be joined by the Hunkpapas the next spring in hostile displays against the whites, and Ruffee thought that if those at Devils Lake were fed, the more remote bands might get the word and be influenced to settle down on the reservation. 3 Partly in response to Ruffee's recommendation, the appointment of an agent was considered early in 1868, but the absence of an appropriation for these Indians rendered such an appointment superfluous, in the eyes of Secretary of Interior Browning. The congressional act that year which appropriated $30,000 for the Indians at Fort Wadsworth also provided $ 15,000 for the Devils Lake group and placed Bishop Whipple in charge of the expenditure. When Dr. Jared W. Daniels was appointed agent for the Sissetons and Wahpetons in 1869, he investigated the situation at Devils Lake and found a population of just over four hundred, of whom only ninety were men. The commandant at Fort Totten had provided them with some seed corn, which they planted with the aid of pointed sticks and elk and deer horns, but none of it ripened before frost. Daniels had fifty acres broken--as much as they would need the next season. Only a few really wanted to cultivate the soil in the white man's fashion, he thought; the rest wanted to plant "the same as they always have as Blanket Indians." 4 The Indians complained, through the military, of Daniels' management of their affairs. The "acting head chief" of the Sissetons at Devils ______ December 14 and 30, 1867, and January 17 and July 14, 1868; Benjamin Thompson to Justus C. Ramsey, January 15, 1868; Joseph R. Brown to N. G. Taylor, August 11, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 3 Charles A. Ruffee to Charles E. Mix, December 2, 1867; Ruffee to N. G. Taylor, March 2, 1868, ibid. 4 N. G. Taylor to Benjamin Thompson, March 25, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LS; Orville Browning to N. G. Taylor, April 6 and August 17, 1868; Captain L. M. Kellogg to General O. D. Greene, Assistant Adjutant General, Headquarters, Department of Dakota, October 24, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, p. 332. -221- Lake, Tiwashte, or Good Lodge (usually called Little Fish), protested to the garrison at Fort Ransom that all that his people had received out of the appropriation in 1869 were a tin cup of corn, a bucket of seed potatoes, and one paper each of carrot, beet, turnip, and rutabaga seed per family. They had arrived too late in the season to mature, so the Indians would again face starvation unless aided by the military. 5 Although Little Fish may have exaggerated, Daniels did favor holding assistance to the Devils Lake group to a minimum, so that the serious farmers there would be induced to move to the Sisseton Reservation, and he seems to have spent very little time at the more northerly reservation. He employed Peter Sutherland as a sort of subagent at Devils Lake, but Sutherland's residence there was not continuous and may not have been of much benefit to the Indians. 6 By 1870 it was generally accepted that there were enough Indians permanently located at Devils Lake to warrant the appointment of a regular agent. Daniels admitted his inability to look after them and thought that an agent stationed there would keep them from drifting back to the Missouri River, where they would be in contact with hostile elements. Early in the next year William H. Forbes, an old friend and employee of Sibley, was appointed agent. Forbes had been a resident of Minnesota since 1837, had operated a trading post on the old reservation, had served as provost marshal during the trials in the fall of 1862, and was thoroughly acquainted with the Sioux. 7 After a flying trip to Fort Wadsworth to confer with Daniels and receive $3,147.20 intended for the Devils Lake Indians, he returned to St. Paul to buy clothing and other supplies before entering upon his work at the agency early in May. Finding the Indians in a "deplorable condition," he immediately ordered quantities of flour and pork, as well as seed potatoes. More than twenty adults had died the previous winter, chiefly, Forbes thought, because of a lack of animal food. Game was almost nonexistent in the country around Devils Lake; a party that arrived _______ 5 Kellogg to Greene, October 24, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 6 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, p. 332; Major George A. Williams, commanding Fort Totten, to Greene, December 10, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 7 Ely S. Parker to Henry H. Sibley, April 5, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LS; Jared W. Daniels to Parker, September 26, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency; William H. Forbes to Parker, February 8 and 21, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; J. Fletcher Williams, "A History of the City of St. Paul, and of the County of Ramsey, Minnesota," Minnesota Historical Collections, IV ( 1876), 54-56. Forbes had also served in the territorial council. -222- from the Missouri shortly after Forbes reached the agency reported that they had seen no buffalo in thirty days' travel across the prairies. 8 If Forbes worked no miracles in his first months at the agency, it should be pointed out that he was forced to operate under considerable handicaps. Like Thompson at the beginning of his work at the Lake Traverse reservation, Forbes was dependent on the military for a place to live, to conduct agency business, and to store supplies. Fortunately, the commanding officer turned over to him some log buildings that had served as temporary quarters while Fort Totten was being erected. Forbes described them as unfit for occupancy, but he nevertheless put one to use as an agency office and another as a storeroom; he found living quarters for himself and his family in the fort itself. This made for an extremely awkward situation, especially considering the jealousy then prevailing between the military and the Indian agents. There was always the possibility that as the garrison was increased, the quarters assigned to Forbes would be needed, and the site where the log buildings stood might also be needed for other purposes. Although he promptly requested authority to build a storeroom, an agent's house and office, and other necessary adjuncts to an agency, the Indian Office granted his request only grudgingly and in piecemeal fashion. Forbes remained a guest of the fort all during his term as agent, and as late as the 1890's some of the log buildings were still being used, though then only as a guardhouse. 9 One of Forbes' handicaps was that the Indians who settled at Devils Lake were less advanced than those at Fort Wadsworth. The Christianized members of the tribe had largely located on the Sisseton Reservation, and it was the pagan element who predominated at Devils Lake. The Cutheads had scarcely come under the influence of missionaries and agents at all. Although their head chief, Wanatan, seems to have been one of the most sensible and stable of the Indian leaders, his influence was partially negated by constant additions to their numbers from other segments of the tribe, either homeless wanderers from as far away as the Milk River region of Montana, or families nominally attached to the Standing Rock agency. Thus Forbes had to contend with inexperience and some reluctance when he attempted to induce his Indians to farm, and in addition had to face the repeated disruptions _______ 8 Forbes to Parker, March 20 and 25, and May 4, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. 9 Forbes to Parker, May 10, 1871; Forbes to Edward P. Smith, August 4, 1873, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1893, p. 229. -223- caused by new and even less civilized groups joining the Indians already on the reservation. 10 Although the official correspondence makes no mention of them, there were probably also some lower Sioux who drifted down to Devils Lake from the Turtle Mountain area, after fleeing to Canada in 1862 and 1863. In 1869, General Henry A. Morrow, sent out to report on the number and tribal affiliation of these Indians along the international boundary, wrote to his superior that some Santees were moving back and forth across the border, living by hunting and by robbing supply trains. Reputed to be the most intelligent Indians on the plains, they were said to have retained enough of their religious training so that they chanted psalms around their campfires and on occasion substituted some of Isaac Watts' hymns for their own songs at scalp dances. 11 Although the cultural diversity of the Indians who settled at Devils Lake constituted something of a hindrance to the government's attempt to make them self-supporting, the reservation had the advantage of much greater continuity of personnel than did the Sisseton Reservation. Except for an interregnum of ten months, only three agents served here for the first nineteen years that the agency existed. More important, all three men had been there, in one capacity or another, from the beginning of the agency and pursued essentially the same policy as agents. The available evidence indicates that all three executed their trust with diligence and honesty. Few complaints from the Indians reached the commissioner's office, though of course this dearth of criticism may have been the result of an inability to communicate their troubles to higher authority rather than evidence of satisfaction with the way the agency was being run. Usually, however, when a military post existed on an Indian reservation, discontented Indians found a ready ear for their complaints, which were then forwarded indirectly to the commissioner without the agent's knowledge. Thus it seems likely that Forbes and his successors managed to stay on good terms with the Indians while at the same time pressing forward the objectives of their superiors in regard to the civilization of their charges. Of the men Forbes hired before taking over the agency, easily the most valuable was James McLaughlin, later to become agent himself. ______ 10 Forbes to Parker, May 10, 1871; Forbes to E. P. Smith, August 1, 1873; James McLaughlin to Acting Commissioner S. A. Galpin, October 6, 1876; McLaughlin to John Q. Smith, February 27, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 259. 11 General Henry A. Morrow to Greene, November 19, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR, Fort Berthold Agency. -224-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:52:28 GMT -5
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: * Not quite thirty when he came to Devils Lake, he had lived in Minnesota since 1863, had married a woman of Sioux descent, and had acquired at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Dakota language. A couple of months after Forbes entered upon his duties, McLaughlin left St. Paul with a bull train consisting of ten wagons and twenty yoke of oxen, bound for the remote Devils Lake agency. Although officially employed as a blacksmith, he was given to understand by Forbes, who was in poor health, that most of the agent's work would fall on him. His salary was later raised, and eventually he was designated as Forbes' overseer. 12 He was a good choice, as became more evident when he assumed the post of agent in 1876. Forbes also brought with him a practical farmer of mixed blood, George W. Faribault, who began at once instructing the Indians in more efficient farming methods. Some of them had hidden a supply of seed corn, which they now brought out and planted. Together with forty bushels of seed potatoes brought from Fort Abercrombie and some turnip seed turned over by the local quartermaster, it provided them with quite a good crop in the summer of 1871--fifteen hundred bushels of corn, five hundred bushels of potatoes, and a thousand bushels of turnips, according to the agent's official report. The Indians that season also put up two hundred tons of hay and cut more than ten thousand fence rails. With the aid of a sawmill lent by the post quartermaster, Forbes had enough logs cut for twenty houses. 13 During the course of that year he obtained eight work oxen, and by selecting four more from the beef cattle purchased that fall, he provided the agency with enough oxen to begin the spring work in 1872. The acreage under cultivation was substantially increased that year, although seed wheat ordered by the agent arrived too late for planting, and grasshoppers consumed most of the other small grains. That season the agency received a mower-reaper, a horse rake, and a two-horsepower thresher, the first farm machinery of consequence in use at Devils Lake. 14 Despite these and other evidences of progress, the bulk of the Indians' subsistence continued for some years to be provided by the government. Before Forbes' arrival, Sutherland had been issuing one pound of ____________________ 12 James McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910), pp.8-9; Forbes to Francis A. Walker, January 6, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; H. R. Clum to Forbes, March 26,1873, NARS, RG 75, LS. 13 Forbes to Parker, May 10, 1871; Forbes to Clum, September 30, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, p. 535. 14 Forbes to Walker, January 6, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 259. -225- flour per day to each working Indian and two barrels of pork per month, to be divided among all five hundred. Since this ration was grossly insufficient, Forbes borrowed powder and lead from the post trader and gave them to trustworthy Indians so that they could kill ducks and other waterfowl while awaiting the arrival of supplies. The supplies, which never seemed to come in sufficient quantity for the constantly increasing number of Indians on the reservation, were issued in accordance with the terms of the 1867 treaty--exclusively in return for labor performed except for the elderly and infirm. 15 One reason for the inadequacy of the supplies was that the apportionment of funds to the two reservations set up by the treaty never accurately reflected the actual number of Indians present. In 3872, Forbes complained that Devils Lake had received only $25,440.22, as against $49,440.22 for the other reservation, despite the fact that there were then between nine hundred and a thousand Indians at the former. Furthermore, the Sisseton agency had been in existence since 1867, and the agent already had much equipment to work with which had to be purchased for Devils Lake out of current appropriations. In response to the agent's complaints, the appropriation that year was reapportioned on a basis of a thousand at Devils Lake to fifteen hundred at Sisseton, but the division of funds between the two remained a sore spot with Forbes, who repeatedly urged that appropriations be made separately for the two agencies. 16 Other problems plagued the agent in the early years of his administration. Prior to his arrival, several white men had settled on or near the reservation, ostensibly to establish farms but really to ply the liquor trade with the military garrison. Since the nearest "seat of justice" was at Pembina, some 140 miles away across trackless prairies, Forbes found it impossible to take legal action against the men, who were also charged with selling whiskey to the Indians. 17 The military post presented a more direct menace early in 1872, when Forbes was notified that the military reservation encompassed more than half the Indian reservation, including all the best land, all the fresh water, and nearly all of the timber. Except for eighty acres, all the Indians' improvements and houses were included, and they were for- ____________________ 15 Forbes to Parker, June 8, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, pp. 536-537. 16 Forbes to Walker, July 8, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 260. 17 Forbes to Clum, December 5, 1871; Forbes to E. P. Smith, August 22, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. -226- bidden to cut wood on this portion of what they supposed to be their reservation. There followed a period of uncertainty, during which the dispute was carried all the way to the Secretaries of Interior and War. General Philip H. Sheridan, then commanding the Military Division of the Missouri, recommended that, pending a top-level decision, the Indians be allowed to enjoy all the privileges they had been used to. His recommendation was passed along to Forbes, who asked that the status quo be maintained until the land had been allotted according to the treaty, and promised that in the meantime no improvements would be made or farms opened nearer than four miles from the fort. Secretary of War Belknap wrote Secretary of Interior Delano in October, approving Forbes' recommendation, with the proviso that his concurrence not be construed as a renunciation of the military's claims to the land. The military reservation was eventually reduced, by stages, but it remained a source of irritation until Fort Totten was finally abandoned in 1890. 18 Another development in 1872, which proved both an annoyance and a convenience, was the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad west from Fargo. It was a convenience in that it permitted supplies to be shipped by rail to Jamestown, eighty-two miles from the agency. Eight hundred barrels of flour had cost $7,960 delivered at the agency before the coming of the railroad; in 1873, the first year the new line was used, the cost was $4,704.10. 19 But the railroad was not welcomed by the Indians. Although they had agreed in the 1867 treaty to permit the building of railroads through the unceded country, they resented the appearance of white settlers who followed in the wake of the construction crews. It was this dilemma that led to the negotiations for the cession of the unceded lands in 1872 and 1873. The Devils Lake Indians offered more opposition to signing the agreement than those at Sisseton did, and were finally persuaded to sign only by the inclusion of an article later stricken out by the Senate. Although Forbes doubted that they would ratify the amendments, they did so in May, 1873, after opposition from some who wanted payment made in cash rather than deposited in the civilization fund. 20 ____________________ 18 Forbes to Walker, February 3 and April 9, 1872; Secretary of War W. W. Belknap to Secretary of Interior Columbus Delano, March 23 and October 16, 1872, NARS,'RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. The successive orders defining the boundaries of the Fort Totten military reservation are printed in 53rd Cong., 3rd Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 79. 19 Forbes to Walker, July 10 and October 9, 1872; Forbes to E. P. Smith, August 24, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. 20 Forbes to Walker, July 10, 1872; Forbes to Clum, March 28, 1873, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 259; 1873, p. 229. -227- When the Indian agencies were parceled out among the various religious denominations, Devils Lake was assigned to the Catholic Church. Hence it was logical that when a school was started there, it should be placed under the management of a religious order of that church. Forbes began agitating early for a manual labor school and was authorized to start building one in 1873. Arrangements were then made to put it under the supervision of the Sisters of Charity, more commonly known as the Grey Nuns of Montreal, but delays of one sort or another prevented the school from opening until the fall of 1874. The two-story brick structure, sixty by forty feet, was made available to girls of all ages and to boys under twelve. The four sisters who operated it were paid only $150 per year, in addition to their rations drawn from the agency supplies. In order to induce parents to send their children, Forbes permitted double rations to be issued, one set to the children at school, the other to their parents at home. His argument (besides the need for some special inducement) was that single rations would not be enough to subsist the children at school, since at home they enjoyed the benefit of any crops their parents raised. The scheme seems to have worked, for the school was soon filled to capacity and Forbes was calling for an addition. 21 Although the agency site was turned over by the War Department in 1873--permanently, as Forbes understood the arrangement--the manual labor school was erected some seven miles away, presumably to have it as far as practicable from the fort. This decision meant that the administrative and educational functions of the agency were separated and carried on at a considerable distance from each other. When an agency building was begun in 1874, to replace the sod-roofed log buildings of the "old post," it was located on the old site, and the bifurcation of administrative function was made permanent. As for the Indians, they were even more dispersed. At first they had settled in five or six encampments, mostly in wooded areas, but after a few years they began to scatter over the reservation on individual farms, as desired by their agent. Nothing approximating a survey was undertaken until 1875. Many of the Indians wished to retain their lands in common ownership and opposed the suggestion of surveying the reservation until 1874, when good crops the previous year had enabled them to pass the ____________________ 21 Forbes to Parker, May 10, 1871; Forbes to E. P. Smith, July 9, 1874, and February 26, 1875; McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, January 31, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, pp. 227-229; 1874, pp. 238-239. -228-
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: *
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: * Nebraska State Historical Society Pilgrim Congregational Church, Santee Agency. The main part was built in the early 1870's. Photograph by Grant for the National Park Service, 1952
Boys' Junior Endeavor, Santee Normal Training School
Gabriel Renville (Ti-wakan). Photograph by C. M. Bell, 1880-1881
Fort Totten, 1878
Payment to Minnesota Mdewakantons, 1885
Joseph La Framboise and a group of Sioux at the door of the Sisseton Agency, 1896. Photograph by E. A. Bromley
Fort Totten Indian school band
winter in fairly comfortable circumstances and they became convinced that farming in the white man's fashion was worth a try. The survey made in 1875 was not complete enough to permit allotment of homesteads, as had been done at Santee and Sisseton. In only two townships were even the section corners established, and part of the reservation was not surveyed at all. 22 From what has already been noted, it is evident that progress in the direction desired by the Indian Bureau was slower at Devils Lake than at Sisseton. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, because the Devils Lake people were less advanced to begin with, their condition at any given time was somewhat behind that of the Sissetons. Still, there was progress. As early as 1872 Forbes reported that more than fifty men dressed like the whites, and the next year he said that seventy-five were living in houses and most had adopted white dress. His successor claimed in 1875 that 275 were then dressed in "citizen's garb." A later agent encouraged this transformation by reducing the quantity of blankets issued and substituting clothing; he even went so far as to issue only white blankets, which the Indians almost had to use exclusively as bed covering. At that time, in 1878, the agent wrote of the Indians: "They are all anxious now for white mans full dress since many of them have cut their hair." 23 They may not have been "anxious," but they had little choice but to accept what was given them. Although Devils Lake and Sisseton were subject to the same general regulations regarding rations and annuity goods, there were differences in the manner of distribution. For one thing, until 1877 the issues were made weekly at Devils Lake, despite the waste of time involved in having the heads of families come to the agency each Monday to receive supplies. Biweekly issues were adopted in 1877 and replaced two years later by a monthly issue, which had been the practice at Sisseton for several years. Fortunately, the Indians were not restricted solely to these periodic issues for needed supplies. Those who performed labor around the agency or on their farms or who helped haul supplies from ____________________ 22 Forbes to E. P. Smith, August 4, 1873, February 5, 1874, and February 26, 1875; Moses K. Armstrong to E. P. Smith, June 28, 1875; Paul Beckwith to J. Q. Smith, January 22, 1876, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, p. 230; 1875, p. 239. Beckwith wanted the agency moved to where the school, mill, and Indian farms were located in order to reduce conflict between military and Indian service personnel. 23 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 259; 1873, p. 228 ; 1875, p. 239 ; McLaughlin to Ezra A. Hayt, March 7, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. -229- Jamestown were paid in "checks" printed in various denominations and usable as a medium of exchange at the agency storeroom. Even though a force of white employees was maintained, there was enough work around the agency to furnish employment to quite a number of Indians. They hauled wood, brick, and stone when the school building was going up, and they brought in and stacked wheat and made the agency hay. In addition, they did their own farm work, including the building of stables. 24 As at Sisseton, the agents discriminated in the issuance of rations between the industrious and the "disobedient or indolent," as one called them. The latter group received the basic issue of pork, flour, and tobacco, but only the workers were entitled to soap, sugar, coffee, tea, candles, and kerosene. In 1877 the agent was issuing a pound of soap per month to each family who owned and occupied a log house. 25 There was, of course, some opposition to this regimen. As at Sisseton, some of the Indians objected to working for the annuities to which they were entitled under the terms of the agreement providing for the cession of their lands. Their resentment sometimes had deeper origins. Forbes remarked, with unusual insight, that it was hard to teach an Indian to farm, "especially as he views his teachers as belonging to the race who brought him to this necessity of manual labor for support." Frequent visits from Indians of other reservations not only interfered with work going on at Devils Lake but apprised the local Indians that at some of the agencies west of the Missouri rations were issued to people who did nothing to earn them. 26 Except for this rather low-key resentment, relations between the successive agents at Devils Lake and their Indians appear to have been largely harmonious during the seventies and eighties. The self-contained little community was spared the extreme factionalism that so disrupted the Sisseton Reservation. Possibly one reason for the comparative harmony prevailing at Devils Lake was the fact that Forbes did not try to push the Indians too far or too fast or interfere seriously with their traditional customs. There is little mention in his official reports of dances, though unquestionably they continued throughout the period. A later agent complained that several work oxen had been sacrificed at one of ____________________ 24 McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, September 18, 1876, and March 28 and July 7, 1877; McLaughlin to Hayt, October 4, 1879; Forbes to E. P. Smith, September 6, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. 25 McLaughlin to Hayt, December 24, 1877, ibid. 26 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, p. 229; 1874, p. 239 ; 1875, p. 240 ; Forbes to E. P. Smith, September 6, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. -230- the dances, and he clamped down on the "medicine dance," at which property was given away. Nor was there any wholesale assault on native marriage practices. Forbes noted in his second annual report that more than one hundred children and several adults had been baptized and "some few have been married legally," but neither he nor his immediate successors exhibited the fanatical zeal for the extirpation of polygamy and Indian marriages that Moses N. Adams displayed at Sisseton. 27 Agent Forbes, whose health had been undermined by military service in the Civil War, died in the summer of 1875. McLaughlin applied for the position of agent, but the Catholic Board recommended an outsider, Paul Beckwith, who was appointed and took charge of the agency early in September. Beckwith may have been a capable man, but the continued presence of McLaughlin on the agency staff created an awkward situation, which Beckwith tried to remedy by discharging his rival, ostensibly for reasons of economy. Ironically, at the very time that Beckwith was announcing the discharge of McLaughlin, the head of the Catholic Board, General Charles Ewing, was recommending the removal of Beckwith as agent and McLaughlin's appointment to the post. When McLaughlin took charge, on July 3, 1876, he found that his predecessor had used up nearly all the provisions and returned the remaining cash to the Treasury, so as to embarrass the new agent, and had even taken with him all the agency records and blank forms needed to carry on the staggering amount of bookkeeping demanded by the Indian Office. 28 With so inauspicious a beginning, McLaughlin might have been pardoned if he had spent the first few months of his administration merely undoing the damage of his predecessor. As a matter of fact, however, he set to work with commendable energy, following roughly the same approach initiated by Forbes, and executed the government's purposes so ____________________ 27 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1872, p. 260; 1876, p. 25 ; McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, February 16,1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. The first serious attempt to regularize the Indians' marriage practices came in the winter of 1881-1882, when the new agent, John W. Cramsie, called together the chiefs and headmen and set up rules that no man should have more than one wife and all should be married by a clergyman. As a result of this order, said the agent, some Indians who had lived together for years, and had married sons or daughters, had come to be married by the priest. See Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1882, p. 21. 28 Beckwith to J. Q. Smith, February 20 and March 21, 1876; Charles Ewing to Secretary of the Interior, March 31, 1876; McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, July 3, 1876, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. -231-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:53:00 GMT -5
successfully that he stayed on as agent for more than five years. Some of the Indians who had fled the reservation when Beckwith became agent now returned, and soon McLaughlin had about 1,100 Sioux under his jurisdiction. As if this increase in the reservation population did not constitute enough of a challenge, he assumed control of the agency at a critical time, just after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when every white settler on the northern plains lived in momentary expectation of an Indian attack. Rumors of an impending raid on Fort Totten were given some credence by the agent, who sent out a scouting party of twenty trusted men to verify the reports. They found nothing, but the rumors kept circulating. McLaughlin felt obliged to testify to the loyalty and docility of his Indians, for irresponsible or frightened whites repeatedly spread reports of depredations and possible massacres by the Devils Lake Sioux. 29 The war scare eventually died down, and the agent was able to move ahead with his plans for the civilization of his Indians. Among his accomplishments was the distribution, in 1877, of 50 cows, 14 calves, 2 bulls, and 187 pigs. He believed that diversified agriculture offered a better prospect for ultimate self-support than the heavy reliance on corn, potatoes, and root vegetables which had been the Indians' chief products thus far. Although some efforts had been made to raise wheat, the Indians preferred corn because it yielded more per acre. They grew the northern variety called "Ree" corn, cultivated by the Arikaras and other sedentary tribes of the upper Missouri. They ordinarily used it in soup, flavored with a small amount of meat, or pounded it into a coarse hominy. McLaughlin's experiment with cows and pigs was not conspicuously successful, and in 1878 he turned to wheat raising, which was shortly to become the mainstay of white settlers in that region. Only five hundred bushels were produced that year, in comparison with ten thousand bushels of corn, an equal quantity of potatoes, more than five thousand bushels of turnips, and fifteen hundred bushels of oats; but the acreage increased rapidly after that, from seventy-five acres in 1879 to over a thousand four years later. 30 Because the amount of grain raised soon exceeded the capacity of the Indians to harvest and thresh it with the means at their disposal, McLaughlin kept nagging at the Indian Office to provide him with ____________________ 29 McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, June 21 and August 14, 1876, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1876, p. 25; McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian, p. 22. 30 Forbes to E. P. Smith, May 2, 1874; McLaughlin to Hayt, February 19, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1877, p. 57; 1878, p. 27 ; 1879, p. 28 ; 1883, p. 24. -232- machinery. In 1879 he promised the Indians that anyone raising more than one acre of wheat could have it cut by machine. The Indian Office enabled him to keep his promise and also fulfilled his request for a threshing machine, though not the kind he had requested. Among McLaughlin's other accomplishments were the organization of a police force, the increased employment of Indians as apprentices to the blacksmith, carpenter, and other agency employees, and the construction of a gristmill. When the nucleus of his police force had been organized, he asked that they be allowed to carry carbines or revolvers or both. To the query as to whether they might not use these weapons too freely, he replied: "My experience has shown me that Indians are less excitable, more collected, and much more prudent in such matters than white men are, and will never resort to the use of arms unless oblidged to protect themselves." 31 He may have revised his thinking on this point after Indian police under his direction at Standing Rock killed Sitting Bull in 1890. The boarding school continued to operate during McLaughlin's time, although the Indian Office almost killed it at one time by trying to transform it into a day school and requiring the nuns to subsist themselves. Running it as a day school would have meant the end of the duplicate ration system that Forbes had devised, and McLaughlin feared that without this inducement not one child would come to school. The Sister Superior was ready to close the school, but McLaughlin ordered it continued while he haggled with the authorities in Washington. For a total cost of $1,255 a year, exclusive of rations, the government received the services of the four nuns, three helping girls, and a chaplain; one of the nuns doubled as physician and performed most of the medical services required on the reservation. It was a good bargain, as the agent hastened to point out. The matter was finally resolved by a compromise: after July 1, 1878, the school personnel subsisted themselves but received an increase in pay; the school continued as a boarding school, but the children received only single rations. 32 ____________________ 31 McLaughlin to Hayt, July 10 and August 30, 1879, and September 28 and December 19, 1878; McLaughlin to Roland E. Trowbridge, November 15 and 30, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, pp. 27-28; 1879, p. 28 ; 1880, p. 30. 32 McLaughlin to J. Q. Smith, January 31 and June 20, 1877; McLaughlin to Hayt, July 20, 1878; J. B. A. Brouillet to J. Q. Smith, February 9, 1877; Brouillet to Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, February 2, 1880; McLaughlin to Brouillet, January 22, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. According to Agent Beckwith, each sister received $150, or a total of $600 per year. Adding fourteen cents exchange per dollar, this amounted to $684. Three helping girls received a total -233- Since the sisters had stipulated that only boys under twelve would be taken into their school, the older boys were left without educational facilities. Beckwith had experimented with two day schools for them, but nothing seems to have come of his attempt. In 1877, McLaughlin began agitating for an addition to the old school, and the next year he submitted a proposal for a new building, in which a school for older boys could be maintained. The addition was erected in 1878 and part of it put to use as a hospital, something the various agents had long thought desirable. In the spring of 1879 a lay brother of the Benedictine Order joined the mission and took charge of the manual labor part of the school. Early in 1880 the Reverend Claude Ebner opened a school for older boys in some of the old log buildings. Included with the school was a forty-acre tract to be used in the teaching of practical agriculture. Two years later a building was erected especially for this school. 33 In 1881, McLaughlin was transferred to the more lucrative post of agent at Standing Rock, and his place at Devils Lake was taken by John W. Cramsie, who had run a store near the agency since 1877. Cramsie's acquaintance with the reservation extended much farther back than his four-year term as trader, however. He had first come there in 1867 as an employee of the Quartermaster Department at Fort Totten and, because of his knowledge of Dakota, was speedily given work in connection with the Indians. He had taken the first census of them and issued their first rations. For a time during Forbes' term, he served as interpreter. Thus he was thoroughly familiar with the situation at Devils Lake and apparently in sympathy with the policies followed by Forbes and McLaughlin. Appointed while James A. Garfield was President, he served through the administrations of Arthur and Cleveland and well into the Harrison administration--more than nine years in all, important years for the Indians of the Devils Lake Reservation. 34 Under Cramsie's direction, the Indians made some long strides toward the goal of complete self-support through agriculture. Assuming that their chief reliance, like that of the white settlers who were swarm- ____________________ (including exchange) of $171. The chaplain received $400. See Beckwith to J. Q. Smith, December 30, 1875, ibid. 33 Beckwith to J. Q. Smith, January 18, 1876; McLaughlin to Hayt, January 3, 1880; McLaughlin to Brouillet, January 22, 1880, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1877, p. 56; 1878, p. 28 ; 1880, p. 30 ; 1882, p. 20. 34 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1881, p. 35; 1882, p. 20 ; 1887, pp. 27 - 28 ; Walker to Forbes, July 26, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LS. -234- ing in around the reservation, should be on wheat-raising, he increased the acreage devoted to it year by year and continued McLaughlin's policy of acquiring ever more farm machinery. His annual reports show a rapidly increasing acreage: 1,500 in 1882, 2,480 in 1884, 3,850 in 1886, over 4,000 in 1887, 5,500 in 1889. Even before McLaughlin's departure, all of the actual farming was done by the Indians themselves, though with supervision by the agent and his employees. Not all of the machinery required to harvest and thresh the crops then being raised was provided by the government. In 1883, Cramsie reported that ten Indians had raised $88.50 toward the purchase of a McCormick self-binder, and he offered to contribute $192 from his own funds. The next season the harvest was carried on with the aid of seven self-raking reapers provided by the government, twelve Indian-owned reapers, and three self-binders.35 It should perhaps be mentioned that by the 1880's the Indians were moving into the area of a cash economy. The machinery they owned had been purchased with money earned by delivering wood to the schools and by selling wheat to the Turtle Mountain reservation. They had made $1,813 in that way and had used $1,370 for machinery. Cramsie commented that the Sioux took satisfaction in selling their surplus wheat to the Chippewas at Turtle Mountain. Some cash was also earned from the sale of down timber and buffalo bones collected on the prairie. During at least part of this time the Indians also filled the wood contract for the military post. 36 Among Cramsie's other contributions to the progress of the agency were the issue of mares, which he thought better suited to the climate than oxen, and the erection of a number of new buildings long needed. He made an addition to the gristmill and paid the miller out of a 1/10 toll taken from all grain brought to be ground there. Despite all these improvements, the Indians' production of grain outran the capacity of the machinery and horses available. In 1887, Cramsie complained that the lack of the essential machinery constituted a bottleneck which limited further increases in production. Apparently the bottleneck was relieved, for acreage continued to increase in the following years, as did total production when the weather permitted. Symptomatic also of progress was the discontinuance of rations in 1884 to all but the old and infirm. The Indians had been prepared for this change by the expiration ____________________ 36 Ibid., 1882, p. 20; 1883, p. 24; 1884, pp. 30-31, 34; 1886, p. 54; 1887, p. 29; 1889, p. 140. 36 Ibid., 1884, p. 31; 1878, p. 27. -235- of their annuities under the 1872 agreement the previous year, and there seems to have been no such period of crisis as occurred at Sisseton. An agent's official reports can conceal as much as they reveal, of course, but Cramsie's long acquaintance with the reservation and his manifestly realistic attitude toward his job lend credence to the picture of steady progress presented by his annual summaries of activities at the agency. 37 Cramsie's realism and his willingness to change his mind are illustrated by his attitude toward the innovation of a court of Indian offenses. The Secretary of the Interior had proposed such an institution in 1882, and early the next year appropriate rules and regulations were drawn up by the Indian Office. Although Cramsie had doubts about the willingness of Indian judges to incur the displeasure of their friends and relatives for no compensation, he dutifully appointed such a court at Devils Lake the same year. By 1884 he saw the institution in a more favorable light. His court had tried forty-two cases in the previous year and administered thirty-four sentences. 38 The court became a permanent institution and was apparently accepted by the Indians. In 1891 it was meeting every second Saturday, with the agent in charge and the head farmer serving as clerk. An Indian policeman would call up a case and make a statement; then the prisoner would defend himself, after which the judges would confer and decide upon the penalty. That year the court tried six cases for damage done by stock, six for drunkenness, ten for gambling, three for desertion, three for adultery, six for assault and battery, and one each for theft, rape, and bastardy. The Indian police force, which had started with only five men, later increased to fifteen but by 1891 was down to eleven. 39 During the eighties the Devils Lake Reservation gradually became part of the world around it, as railroads moved closer and white settlers and towns followed. In 1880, James J. Hill began pushing his St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad (later the Great Northern) west from Grand Forks, and the supply point for the agency changed from Jamestown to the end of the track, about twelve miles west of Grand Forks. By 1883 the nearest station was just northeast of the reservation boundary. From this time on, the freighting of supplies to the agency lost its importance as a source of income for the Indians. In 1883 an ____________________ 37 Ibid., 1884, pp. 30, 32 ; 1886, p. 55 ; 1887, p. 29. 38 Ibid., 1883, pp. xv, 27; 1884, pp. 32-33. In 1885 the court tried forty-eight cases and imposed fines amounting to $186. See ibid., 1885, p. 27. 39 Ibid., 1891, p. 317 ; McLaughlin to Hayt, September 28, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency. -236- agreement was signed by the Indians granting a right-of-way to a line called the Jamestown and Northern. Although the railroad was built and in operation by the spring of 1885, no action on the agreement was taken by Congress until 1901, when it was finally approved and compensation to the Indians authorized. 40 Congress acted somewhat more rapidly to compensate the Indians for another cession of land. When the reservation was established, the western boundary was described as a line extending from the westernmost tip of Devils Lake to the nearest point on the Sheyenne River. Such a line was drawn in 1875, and white settlers a few years later began taking up lands to the west of it. When a resurvey was made in 1883, it was discovered that the nearest point to Devils Lake on the Sheyenne was some distance to the westward. About 64,000 acres of land then being homesteaded really belonged to the Indians. The Secretary of the Interior declined at that time to take any action toward removing the white settlers or passing on the justness of the Indians' claim. He seemed skeptical of the whole business, suggesting that perhaps the river had changed its course in the intervening years. In 1887, however, Commissioner John D. C. Atkins asked that Congress take action to compensate the Indians for the loss of this land. Cramsie recommended that they be paid a dollar an acre for it and that the money be used to buy stock, machinery, and other items needed for the Indians' further advance in agriculture. The wheels of bureaucracy ground slowly, and this recommendation did not reach Congress until 1890. Finally, in 1891, when allotment was being pressed on the Indians and meeting unexpected resistance, Congress got around to paying the Indians--at a rate of $1.25 per acre, which gave the Indian Bureau $80,000 to expend in behalf of the Devils Lake people. Immediately contracts were let for 200 brood mares, 100 cows, 100 steers, 4 bulls, 75 plows, 100 sets of harness, and 50 sets of ox harness, and estimates were submitted for material and labor to repair 217 houses. 41 This windfall--for such it really was--thus was not dissipated in per capita payments, but was spent for articles and services of long-term benefit to the tribe. The passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 led eventually, though not immediately, to the allotment of the Devils Lake Reservation. As soon ____________________ 40 McLaughlin to Trowbridge, April 8 and September 6, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Devils Lake Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 27; 1885, p. xxxiii; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXI, 1447. 41 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1887, pp. liii, 26-27; 1891, pp. 107, 318 ; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXVI, 1010. -237- as the act had been passed, Cramsie began allotting farms but suspended operations upon learning that the act required the services of a special agent to perform this task. Not until two years later did actual work get under way, and then it ran into opposition from the Indians, who objected to paying taxes and being subject to the white man's laws, which they suspected would be enforced to their disadvantage. They announced that if they were paid for the portion of the reservation that had been inadvertently opened to settlement and for the right-of-way granted the Jamestown and Northern, and had their annuities under the 1851 treaties restored, they might be willing to accept citizenship. Nonetheless, allotment continued, interrupted once by the death of the special agent originally sent out to do the job, and was finally completed in 1892. Patents were issued the following year. 42 Allotment in severalty proved to be the same tragic failure at Devils Lake as elsewhere. Although it cannot be assigned sole blame for all the misfortune that subsequently befell the Indians of that reservation, it certainly contributed importantly. Despite Cramsie's optimistic reports of yearly progress toward self-sufficiency, even he recognized that his efforts were not meeting with complete success. In his last report he remarked of his Indians that he was "not very sanguine that they will ultimately become absolutely self-supporting and civilized," but he did not elaborate on this observation. Earlier reports give some hint of his reasons, however. Starting in 1886, drought began to reduce the crops raised by the Indians. Like the grasshopper plague of the seventies, it was not as destructive at Devils Lake as it was farther south, but there were years when the crop was almost a total failure. The Indians were not, of course, the only ones to suffer from the uncertainty of the climate, but they were perhaps more easily discouraged than many of the white settlers. The agent at Devils Lake in 1895 wrote that the Indians had "on account of rigidity of soil, unfavorable seasons, inexperience, and a multiplicity of causes, done what even experienced white farmers with better advantages have--signally failed in agriculture for the last number of years. . . ." 43 Comprehending the nature of the problem and solving it were, unfortunately, two different things. Before he left office, Cramsie pointed out that Congress failed to appreciate the size of the job it was attempt- ____________________ 42 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1887, pp. 32-33; 1889, pp. 143 - 144 ; 1890, p. xlvi; 1891, p. 317 ; 1892, p. 350 ; 1894, p. 217. 43 Ibid., 1886, p. 54 ; 1889, p. 146 ; 1895, p. 229. -238- ing to do with an annual appropriation of $6,000, $5,000 of which went to pay employees. Some blame also attaches to the Indians. There were years of good crops, such as 1891, the year in which stock in large quantities was issued to the Indians. The evidence provided by the agents' official reports suggests that they did not take full advantage of the opportunity thus presented. Hostility to allotment may have accounted for much of their failure to capitalize on the opportunity; a return of drought during the next three seasons may have canceled the benefits received from the issue. Whatever the reasons, the acreage cultivated remained stationary or dropped during the nineties, and the total output declined even more sharply. By 1892 the crop was described as just enough to provide the Indians with a little credit at stores. 44 From a condition at least approaching self-sufficiency, the Devils Lake Indians slipped back in a few years to almost total dependence on government assistance. In 1893 they were said to be living largely on parched corn and wild turnips. Hunger obliged them to slaughter many of the cattle issued in 1891, and they were too poor to buy replacements. After many years in which the birth rate exceeded the death rate, in 1894 the agent reported forty deaths and only twenty-seven births; the next year about seventy deaths occurred--the cause: want and destitution. Although the death rate was down by 1897, the Indians were described as being farther from self-support that winter than the previous one. The number of cattle, 150 that year, was down to 68 the next, and the agent remarked that the Indians were "surrounded by disadvantages, and their nearest neighbors are poverty, hunger, and failure. . . ." 45 Evidence of decay and deterioration was visible on every hand in the nineties. As at Sisseton, attendance at the reservation schools fell off, although the school system had progressed admirably during the previous decade. The original manual labor school, destroyed by fire in 1883, was replaced three years later, and the two educational institutions showed a steadily increasing enrollment for several years. In ____________________ 44 Ibid., 1889, p. 146 ; 1891, p. 318 ; 1892, p. 351 ; 1893, p. 229 ; 1894, p. 217 ; 1895, p. 228. 45 Ibid., 1893, p. 229; 1894, pp. 217-218; 1895, pp. 228-229; 1897, pp. 211-212; 1898, pp. 221, 223. The agent reported in 1893 that only twenty or thirty families were really self-sustaining; the rest lived from hand to mouth. In 1895 he reported that about 118 elderly people were wholly dependent on the government. -239- 1890 the military post was abandoned and the buildings--thirty-nine in all--turned over to the Indian Bureau. They provided the agency with a capacious school plant, though some of the buildings were not suited to such purposes. Both schools were taken over by the government, but the Grey Nuns were retained as teachers. Although the enrollment was very large in the nineties--as high as 380 in 1895--the children were mostly Chippewas from Turtle Mountain. In 1898 only 65 children at the old school and 4 at the new one were from Devils Lake. The Indians objected to sending their children to the school because there were "too many Chippewas" there, but other reasons may have been more important. As soon as allotment had been carried out and the Indians had become citizens, they became negligent about sending their children to the school. Some complained that the children were ill-treated--and one agent conceded that there might be justice to their complaint; another story was that the Indians had expected to find a market for their produce at the school when the military post was abandoned. When this hope did not materialize, as the school raised its own provisions, they became bitter and refused to send their children, saying they would prefer to do without rations than let the children go. As a result, by 1900 only 109 out of 235 children on the reservation were in the local school. 46 Congress at length showed some signs of recognizing the seriousness of the situation at Devils Lake. In 1895 the customary $6,000 appropriation was doubled, and in each of the four following years $10,000 was appropriated. Though nominally intended to aid the Indians in becoming self-supporting, this money was actually in the nature of direct relief and did little more than keep them alive from year to year. 47 Thus the picture at Devils Lake by the end of the century was essentially the same as that at Sisseton. Despite superficial differences-greater continuity of policy and less dissension at Devils Lake--the results at the two reservations were much the same at the time white ____________________ 46 Ibid., 1883, p. 25 ; 1886, p. 56 ; 1891, pp. 578-579; 1893, p. 437 ; 1895, p. 389 ; 1896, p. 385 ; 1898, p. 222 ; 1899, p. 270 ; 1900, p. 310. 47 When the ten annual installments of the $800,000 paid for lands ceded ended in 1883, Congress began appropriating $8,000 annually for the Devils Lake Reservation. In 1886 the amount was reduced to $6,000, at which level it remained until 1895, when it was increased to $12,000, of which $7,000 was to be made immediately available. Even the highest of these figures represents an amount much smaller than the proportion assigned to Devils Lake from the $80,000 annuity provided under the terms of the agreement. See U.S. Statutes at Large, XXII, 447 ; XXIII, 91, 378 ; XXVII, 135, 628; XXVIII, 303, 892; XXIX, 338 ; XXX, 78, 586, 938. -240-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:53:26 GMT -5
Americans decided that they had done all that duty required of them toward the civilization of the Indian. On both reservations undue haste on the part of the government to force the Indians into full citizenship conspired with an adverse climate to bring about a reversal of the steady progress perceptible during the seventies and eighties and left the Indians, like those at Santee, poorly prepared for the new century. -241- CHAPTER 12 The Flandreau Colony MOST OF THE Santee and Sisseton Sioux were willing to settle down on the reservations provided for them in 1866 and 1867. A few, however, found reservation life too confining and struck out on their own. Significantly, they were not the least civilized members of their tribes, but, in most cases, the very people who had progressed the farthest in adopting the white man's way of life. Mention has already been made of the Sissetons who established the Brown Earth settlement in 1875. This colony proved unsuccessful and did not last, but the one of which it was an imitation, that at Flandreau, South Dakota, was more firmly grounded and has endured for nearly a century. In the spring of 1869, while Agent James M. Stone was accompanying a delegation to Washington, twenty-five families left the Santee Reservation without authorization of any kind and settled on unoccupied land in the valley of the Big Sioux River, near where Charles Flandrau and others had made their abortive attempt to establish a town before the Sioux Uprising. According to John P. Williamson, the missionary who took the most active interest in them, they did so because they wished to break away from tribalism and domination by chiefs and agents and live like white men. Some of them had spent three years in prison at Davenport and while there had undergone not only a religious conversion, but a psychological transformation that -242- substituted the white man's individualism for the Indian attitude of common ownership. Upon settling at Niobrara, they found their old chiefs firmly re-established in power and backed by the authority of a paternalistic government. Rebelling against this state of affairs and at least vaguely aware that the Sioux treaty of 1868 had included a provision permitting Indians to take up homesteads outside the "Great Sioux Reservation" as well as within its boundaries, they decided to test the government's sincerity and good faith. As Williamson pointed out, they had done of their own accord "just what the Government has been for generations trying to get the Indians to do." 1 Without denying the essential correctness of Williamson's analysis of their motives, it is possible to see other reasons for their unprecedented move. The Indians themselves argued that the land was better at Flandreau than on the Santee Reservation, more like the country they had occupied before the uprising. No doubt some members of the group were chronic malcontents such as were found on every reservation, people who resented being subject to any authority, whether exercised by chiefs or by agents. In justification for their actions, the Flandreau settlers wrote the commissioner that they did not wish "to suffer the extortion of our chiefs and agents appointed over us and who collude together and between them both we get well stripped. . . ." This was stating the case rather strongly, for, bad as some agents were, there is nothing in the available evidence to show that Agent Stone was guilty of extortion or of "colluding" with the chiefs to cheat the mass of the Indians. In all probability, these Indians had imbibed, along with the rest of the white man's culture, a sizable measure of selfishness, and they thought they could accomplish their personal objectives better without the agent's supervision. Ownership of land was one means of gratifying their desire, and they were growing impatient with the delay in allotting individual farms at Santee. Coupled with their wish to own their own farms was the fear of another removal which constantly agitated the Santees for nearly two decades. All of these reasons, together with others less apparent, conspired to induce two dozen families to take what can only be described as an extremely daring, even foolhardy, step. 2 ____________________ 1 Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty rears with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), pp. 265-267; John P. Williamson to John A. Burbank, October 22, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, p. 270. 2 Petition of Flandreau Indians to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, December 23, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR. -243- Besides the natural uncertainty over whether they would be able to make a success of farming unaided, these Indians had to consider the possibility that they would not even be allowed to attempt it. The men who exercised authority over them in the name of the United States government were by no means in sympathy with the experiment at the outset. Asa M. Janney, who succeeded Stone as Santee agent soon after the exodus took place, wrote in August that the Indians were not capable of competing with white men in the accumulation of property and would be subjected to great pressures when settlement of the Big Sioux country began and the value of the lands chosen by the Indians became known. Concerned about their morals as well, Janney thought they would be better off in close proximity to schools and missionaries than surrounded by unscrupulous whites who would corrupt their women. 3 Commissioner Parker was of the same mind. In November of that year he wrote Governor John A. Burbank of Dakota Territory, advising him that the Santees should be kept together and instructing him to take steps to induce them to return to their reservation, where Janney was about to begin allotting lands. When Burbank inquired whether they could be aided out of funds being used to encourage the Santees to become self-sustaining, he was told that regulations did not permit diversion of tribal funds to Indians who had voluntarily separated themselves from their tribe and that those people would progress more rapidly if they returned to the reservation and submitted to the government's plans for them. 4 Fortunately for the survival of the Flandreau colony, they had a stalwart friend in missionary Williamson, who seems to have impressed Burbank with the wisdom of letting the Indians try their experiment. He wrote the governor in October that they had raised some corn the previous summer and had put up a number of log houses, evidently planning to hang on if they were allowed to do so. Although their corn amounted to only an acre or so per family and that had been injured by frost so as to be useless as seed, they were hard at work trapping muskrat in the hope of earning enough from the sale of furs to tide them over the winter and give them a start the next season. With no working stock other than their light Indian ponies, they had hired oxen from the three or four whites in the neighborhood and had broken patches of prairie sod, which they had cultivated with hoes and spades. William- ____________________ 3 Asa M. Janney to Ely S. Parker, August 6, 1869, ibid. 4 Parker to Burbank, November 2 and December 14, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LS; Burbank to Parker, November 20, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR. -244- son thought the government ought to aid them by providing oxen, wagons, plows, and other farm implements. "Our Government is spending millions of dollars to support whole tribes of overaged Indian papooses, hoping that some day they will have moral strength enough to undertake the care of themselves," he pointed out. "Here is a small colony that have started out for themselves." 5 Burbank was inclined to agree with Williamson. He had written Commissioner Parker first on July 15 and had received, four months later, only the instructions to have them return to the reservation. He wrote again in November, stressing the benefit of their example to other Indians if they succeeded. Then, in December, the Indians themselves addressed a letter to the commissioner, giving their reasons for their action and asking permission to stay where they were. Parker finally acceded to their request but continued to refuse them any assistance from the government. Although there was no intention of forcing them to return to Santee, he said, if they chose to remain off the reservation, of course they would "forfeit their claim to any part of the payments made to their tribe." 6 Parker had earlier informed Burbank, in reply to a request for information as to whether Indians could avail themselves of the Homestead Act of 1862, that they could do so only if they "permanently and wholly dissolved" all tribal connections. Only then could they exercise the rights and assume the obligations of citizens. Acting on this advice, Burbank had twenty-four members of the colony come to Yankton, the territorial capital, and execute a document renouncing their tribal ties and all benefits due them as members of their tribe. Homestead certificates were then issued to all but two of the group who were unable to pay the fourteen-dollar fee. Many had the exact amount, carefully wrapped, in small coins, showing that they had saved it up over a period of time. Burbank accompanied them to Vermillion, the location of the land office, and helped them in perfecting their titles. 7 Thus the Flandreau colony was formally launched. Abandoning all claim to benefits as members of their tribe seemed a high price to pay for independence. Although the Indians were willing ____________________ 5 Williamson to Burbank, October 22, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR. 6 Burbank to Parker, August 20, 1870, and November 20, 1869; Petition of Flandreau Indians to Commissioner, December 23, 1869, ibid.; Parker to Burbank, March 22, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LS. 7 Parker to Burbank, March to, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LS; Burbank to Parker, June 10, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR. -245- to pay it, some of their white friends did not think they should have to. Williamson though it was penalizing them for doing precisely what the government wanted all Indians to do--strike out on their own and become like white men. Of all the members of their tribe, these people most deserved the attention and encouragement of the government. He did not favor restoring their annuities or issuing rations to them, but he thought it only just that the government restore to them a part of what had been taken from them through the cession of their lands in Minnesota. 8 In time Agent Janney also came around to his view. In 1870 appropriations under the 1868 treaty were held up because of a dispute between the two houses of Congress arising from the House of Representatives' wish to assert its importance and abolish the treaty-making power enjoyed by the Senate. When the squabble was settled and an appropriation was voted early in 1871, Janney inquired of the commissioner whether the Flandreau people could share in the fund. A penciled endorsement, evidently by an official in the Department of the Interior, on Janney's letter reads: "This has been up several times and we have invariably directed that we can do nothing for them." 9 They had to wait another year before any official notice was taken of them. Meanwhile, the Flandreau people were gaining a favorable reputation among their white neighbors. C. K. Howard, a Sioux Falls merchant, wrote Burbank in 1870 that he and his brothers had lent them money which they had repaid more punctually than white men usually did. He remarked that their settlement gave more indications of civilization and industry and "a show of living like white people than the same number of Norwegian families located a few miles below which the government protects and leaves the Indian in doubt." Although some whites were disposed to drive them out, it was probably, as Burbank said, because of a deep-seated prejudice against Indians as a race. Whereas a white man among others of his race was presumed to be honest in the absence of evidence to the contrary, an Indian was ordinarily thought to be a rogue until he proved himself otherwise. Hence the Indian had to be above suspicion if he was to be accorded the respect of white men. This the Flandreau Indians were able to do with surprising success. 10 ____________________ 10 C. K. Howard to Burbank, May 15, 1870; Burbank to Parker, August 20, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR. 8 Williamson to Burbank, July 30, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR. 9 A. M. Janney to Samuel M. Janney, April 18, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency. -246- For the first three years of their experiment, the Flandreau people would perhaps not have been able to survive without help of various kinds from such white neighbors as they had, for their farming did not afford them even a bare subsistence, and the amount of money they could make by trapping and hiring out to white farmers was not enough to make up the difference between what they produced and what they needed to live. Williamson kept up his campaign to have them aided by the government, however, and in 1871 he succeeded to the extent of having a report on their condition published in the commissioner's annual report to the Secretary of the Interior. After describing their struggle and pointing out that among them were four signers of the 1868 treaty, he asked specifically that each family be provided with one yoke of oxen, a wagon and log chain, a plow, a cow, a scythe, a fork, and a hoe. Though the expenditure might judiciously be extended over a period of years, $5,000 should be made available at once. Since the American Board missionaries had been working with the Santee people for decades, he deemed it proper that the money should be expended under the Board's direction. 11 Presumably acting on the recommendation of the Indian Office, Congress included the "Families of Santee Dakota Sioux who have taken Homesteads at or near Flandreau, in Dakota Territory," in the Indian appropriations act of May 29, 1872, though without allocating any specific sum to that group. Some weeks later Sisseton Agent Moses N. Adams was instructed to take steps to build a school for the Flandreau Sioux and to determine what stock, tools, and other items were most needed there. When Adams visited the colony in October, he found 227 people living in 51 log houses. The original 25 families had doubled by the fall of 1869, and more had been arriving since. Their equipment was pitifully meager. Although they had 42 ponies, they were fit only to ride, and the Indians had broken the prairie by exchanging work with the whites. They had a total of 33 hay forks, 35 scythes, 77 hoes, and 1 plow. With these they were attempting to raise corn and potatoes on 152 acres, to which had just been added 61 acres of newly broken ground. They had that season raised nearly 3,000 bushels of corn and nearly 2,000 bushels of potatoes and had cut and stacked over 200 tons of hay. A small log church had been built the previous year and was now offered for sale as a schoolhouse for $3,000. Adams submitted an estimate for $20,000 worth of food, clothing, goods, seeds, and farm implements, and asked an additional $1,800 to ____________________ 11 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, pp. 269-270. -247- cover purchase of the school, purchase of desks and a bell, and payment of a teacher's salary for one year. 12 Once the precedent had been established, it was easier to persuade Congress to appropriate funds for the Flandreau people. They were included in a deficiency appropriation of $350,000 for the "Sioux of Different tribes," made March 3, 1873, and thereafter what they received was determined by the Indian Bureau, acting upon the advice of those on the scene. Agent Adams lived too far from Flandreau to exercise any very effective supervision over affairs there; and late in 1873, John P. Williamson was appointed special agent (at an annual salary of $480) to determine the needs of these people and distribute supplies to them. Williamson was then living at the Yankton agency at Greenwood, D.T., and was able to pay only periodic visits to Flandreau. Neither he nor the Indians wanted an agent located there, since it was just that kind of government supervision that they had rejected, but there was no objection to his looking after their temporal needs in the course of his attention to their spiritual condition. 13 During the brief time that Adams had charge of government assistance to the Flandreau colony, he made two issues, one of clothing worth about $1,800 in the late winter of 1873, and another of oxen, wagons, plows, hoes, scythes, and other tools to the amount of nearly $10,000 the following June. When Williamson visited them in August, he found them using the articles to good advantage and expecting a good crop. Although he opposed issuing food or clothing, he thought the half of the group who had not received oxen, wagons, etc., should be issued those items before the start of the next season. Each family, he thought, should also receive a cow. In addition, Adams had opened a school. Although described as "flourishing" in Adams' official report for 1873, it actually stumbled along with light enrollment for many years. The Indians had taken homesteads scattered along the Big Sioux River for twenty miles or more, and it was impossible to get any large number of children in the school, even though it was centrally located. Williamson kept calling for a boarding hall to accommodate the children who lived too far from the school to travel back and forth every day, but the Indian Office never saw fit to honor his request. 14 ____________________ 12 U.S. Statutes at Large, XVII, 182; Moses N. Adams to Parker, October 9 and 23, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. 13 U.S. Statutes at Large, XVII, 539; Acting Secretary of Interior B. R. Cowen to Commissioner Edward P. Smith, September 10, 1873; Williamson to E. P. Smith, October 16, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency. 14 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, p. 227; Williamson to E. P. Smith, September 1, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Moses K. Armstrong to E. P. Smith, December 28, 1873, and June 12, 1874 -248- Despite his reluctance to issue provisions and thus place the Flandreau people in the same position of dependence on the government as the reservation Santees, Williamson was obliged by repeated crop failures to ask authority to do just that. Except for the first year, however, when he issued $314 worth of pork and flour, he insisted that provisions should be issued only during the season when the Indians were planting and cultivating their crops and when, without such assistance, they would have to leave their farms and hunt to keep their families alive. No matter how poor the crop, he afterward refused to issue provisions during the winter to any but old women, widows, and school children. The precedent for this practice was established in 1873, when the Indians, in compliance with Adams' request that they stay home to receive another issue of supplies, neglected their customary fall hunt, only to learn that no issue could be made that year. Their plight led to some dissatisfaction, expressed in a letter from their most articulate member, David Faribault, and others to Commissioner Edward P. Smith just before the end of the year. Faribault had kept track of every penny expended in behalf of his people and thought, incorrectly, that they were entitled to more. 15 With Williamson's assistance, the Flandreau people made it through the hard winter of 1873-1874 ( Williamson said that most white farmers in western Minnesota and Iowa were supplied with seed wheat at public expense the next season) and set to work the following spring with a determination to show what they could do with the equipment provided by the government. Unfortunately, they were hard hit the next summer by that scourge of the 1870's, the grasshopper. Somewhere between three-fourths and four-fifths of the expected crop was destroyed, leaving them with nothing to fall back upon for the winter. The following winter was one of real hardship. Williamson stuck to his determination not to make any general issue of rations until the planting season. He gave out rations for about a month during the winter to some fifty indigent persons but withheld the rest until March. Meanwhile, the men (and in many cases their families) went out in October and November for an unusually successful trapping season. They went out again in March but found that the bitter cold had frozen the lakes and creeks to the bottom and killed the muskrats. The Flandreau ____________________ Smith, December 28, 1873, and June 12, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency. 15 Williamson to E. P. Smith, November 25, 1873, and J anuary 7 and April 18, 1874; Armstrong to E. P. Smith, December 28, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency. -249- people were the best trappers in the Sioux nation, thought their agent; whereas the Yanktons would hardly bother to trap on their own reservation, these people would "go 50 miles away from timber and settlement, camp at some lake in the cold snow, and work day and night to catch and preserve a few rat and mink skins." 16 Not everyone in the colony approved of the agent's methods of handling rations. David Faribault, who seems to have been ambitious for recognition as the leader of the group, composed a petition and submitted it to Moses K. Armstrong, territorial delegate to Congress, with the signatures of a number of his fellows. He complained that Williamson failed to understand that fur trapping was played out and hence no credit was extended to the Indians on the strength of their expected harvest of furs. Nor was there any longer a market for the Indians' ponies or for cordwood, which they had been selling to the whites before the economic depression had settled over the country. He accused Williamson of distributing the food and clothing to only a few people and of having selfish motives in seeking the position of special agent. Williamson reported later that he had heard that "some political schemers and soft-hearted sympathizers" had been trying to damage his reputation with the Indians, but that he had called them into council and explained the matter, with the result that the criticism died down. 17 Political motives there unquestionably were. Late in 1875, when R. L. Pettigrew, a political figure in the territory, submitted to the territorial delegate, J. P. Kidder, a pair of petitions asking that Faribault be paid for his services, he remarked: "I hope you will take some interest in the matter as with a little care these Indians are inclined to vote the republican ticket and would have done so last year if the matter had been managed right." 18 Citizenship had come to the Flandreau people who had received patents to their land, and they were reaping the benefits. The Flandreau Special Indian Agency remained in existence until 1879, and Williamson served as agent for all but the last few months of this time. On the whole, these were difficult years for the Flandreau people, as they were for other Indian groups living in the same region ____________________ 16 Williamson to E. P. Smith, April 18 and August 31, 1874, and January 14 and 28 and April 10 and May 15, 1875, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 42. 17 David Faribault, et al., to Armstrong, February 1, 1875; Williamson to E. P. Smith, March 12, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency. 18 R. F. Pettigrew to J. P. Kidder, December 3, 1875, ibid. -250-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:54:19 GMT -5
as well as for the white pioneers who were gradually settling up the country. The annual incursions of grasshoppers were the principal reason that farmers on the plains were unable to gain a firm foothold. In 1875, for example, crops at Flandreau looked excellent until July 23, when millions of the insects, properly called Rocky Mountain locusts, descended on the fields and took half the wheat, nearly all the rutabagas, and much of the corn, potatoes, and other vegetables. An early frost nipped the corn and reduced the crop to half what had been expected. Yet Williamson was able to report, somewhat prematurely, that the Indians would harvest 3,485 bushels of corn, 2,470 bushels of potatoes, 1,605 bushels of wheat, and substantial quantities of vegetables--enough to tide them over the winter. 19 The following year only half a crop was realized, and by April, 1877, Williamson had to report that the Flandreau people were starving. They did better the next season, however, for the grasshoppers, though seen, did not settle but flew on. Williamson attributed the deliverance of his people and their white neighbors to the day of prayer declared by the governor. Whatever the cause, the invasions were never so serious in later years, and the Flandreau people began to get on their feet--or would have if other difficulties had not interfered. 20 All through the early 1870's Williamson kept up a running battle for funds with which to encourage the Indians in their efforts. Their right to participate in benefits accorded the various Sioux groups under the treaty of 1868 had been recognized officially in 1874. In May, 1875, they received $5,000 from the proceeds of the sale of the old reservation in Minnesota, and three years later Williamson was authorized to buy them three reapers out of this fund, which thus came to be an important source of money in the lean years of the depression. 21 In another respect their situation changed in 1875. Congress that year extended the benefits of the Homestead Act to Indians without exacting from them a renunciation of benefits to which they might be entitled as members of a recognized tribe. Since this law contained a provision making their homesteads inalienable for five years, the ____________________ 19 Williamson to E. P. Smith, August 6, 1875, ibid.; Williamson to John Q. Smith, April 10, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1875, p. 240. 20 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1876, p. 28; 1877, p. 59. 21 Cowen to E. P. Smith, February 13, 1874; Columbus Delano to E. P. Smith, February 14, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency; Williamson to J. Q. Smith, April 10, 1877; Williamson to Ezra A. Hayt, April 22 and May 21, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -251- Flandreau Indians who acquired title to their farms after that date were protected--for a short time--against loss of their land. Unfortunately, most of their homesteads had been taken up earlier and were not so protected. Some (those under the 1868 treaty) had no restrictive clause and were speedily encumbered with mortgages. By 1876, out of eightyfive homesteads taken, only thirty were patented; on those the owners were paying taxes--excessive taxes, in Williamson's opinion--as they were on their personal property. 22 The living conditions of the Flandreau Indians at this time were similar to those of white pioneers in the same locality. Although most had taken 160-acre claims, they cultivated only from one to ten or perhaps twenty acres of their farms, which were so situated as to have the Big Sioux River running through most of them. Five years after the arrival of the first contingent, they were all living in log cabins with earth roofs and earth floors; most had put up stables of a crude kind and stored enough hay to carry their stock through the winter. As the years passed, their circumstances gradually improved. Beginning in 1878, a concerted effort was made to replace their log cabins with frame houses. That year the government built eight houses at $350 each, and in 1882 it provided twenty more at a total cost of $5,000. With the addition of another twenty in 1884 and a few built by the Indians themselves, by 1887 all were housed in frame dwellings. 23 Gradually during the same years their household furnishings improved and increased. At first few had stoves or much of anything else, but as time went on they provided themselves with what they needed, following their white neighbors' examples. From the very beginning they wore clothing like that of the whites; and in 1875, Williamson hired a seamstress to make clothing for the school children and to teach the women sewing. He and others repeatedly noted that there was little about the dress of these people or their way of life to show that they were Indians. Though nearly all were literate in their own language, few knew much English for a number of years, and they were therefore handicapped in their dealings with white businessmen and farmers. 24 ____________________ 22 U.S. Statutes at Large, XVIII, 420; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1876, p. 27; 1878, p. 31. 23 Williamson to E. P. Smith, January 7, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 31; 1882, p. 116; 1884, p. 124; 1887, p. 159. 24 Williamson to Burbank, October 22, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR; Williamson to E. P. Smith, January 14, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau Special Agency; Williamson to J. Q. Smith, April 16, 1877; Petition of Flandreau Indians, June 24, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -252- Williamson tried to function as an intermediary between the Indians and whites, along with performing his other duties. As he remarked shortly before he left his position, he had been "agent, carpenter, farmer, clerk and interpreter by turns," all of these tasks requiring much labor on his part. When authorized to build eight houses that year, he accompanied sixty Indians to Luverne, Minnesota, the nearest railhead, and bought lumber, then superintended the construction and did much of the work himself. He was insistent, however, that government services to the Flandreau people be held to a minimum. He opposed the appointment of David Faribault as a government employee both because he considered him unqualified and because he believed the Indians would do better with no employees other than an agent and a teacher, and he hoped that the agent could soon be dispensed with. At various times they had asked for a farmer, a blacksmith, and a physician, but he had always opposed such requests. His successor, William H. Wasson, who assumed charge of the agency in August, 1878, apparently had other ideas, for he immediately complained of the lack of facilities and submitted estimates for an agency building and other items that he deemed necessary. The Indian Office was not moved by his request, however, and disallowed all but fifty dollars (for a windmill and pump) out of his estimate of $3,575. Early in 1879 it went even further and consolidated the Flandreau Special Agency with the Santee Agency. Wasson and his wife were retained for a short time as superintendent and teacher, but by November of that year the Reverend John Eastman, a member of the colony, had been placed in charge of the school and was the only government employee. 26 Santee Agent Isaiah Lightner visited Flandreau at the end of April, 1879, and found the Indians "quite indifferent as to having any one to come among them as an Agent. . . ." Three of the men spoke at a council held by Lightner and questioned the need for a government school, inasmuch as they were paying local school taxes. Lightner explained that he had no intention of forcing himself on them but would help them if they wanted help. He had been directed to buy oxen, cows, stoves, and other items for them, but if they did not want these, he would not do so. "They laughed some and did not know exactly ____________________ 25 Williamson to Hayt, July 3, 1878; Williamson to J. Q. Smith, October 3, 1876, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska, Agencies. 26 William H. Wasson to Hayt, August 17 and 26, 1878; Secretary of Interior Carl Schurz to Hayt, March 17, 1879; Isaiah Lightner to Hayt, May 7 and November 26, 1878, ibid. -253- what to say but soon I found they were willing to accept of the goods," wrote Lightner. Clearly the Flandreau people wanted to preserve their self-respect but at the same time did not wish to miss out on anything the government might see fit to give them. Lightner endorsed Williamson's policy and proposed to use as few employees as possible "and to act myself in as unassuming manner as I can to be in charge of them." Since about forty families had less than ten acres broken, he saw the need to supply provisions during the breaking season to keep the Indians from going off on trapping expeditions. 27 Circumstances around the Indian colony were changing by the late 1870's. The town of Flandreau was growing rapidly, and white settlers were filling up the vacant lands between the Indian homesteads. In a petition to Lightner signed by twenty-six members of the colony, the Indians expressed the view that they needed help and guidance more than ever now that "our lands are being cut by R. R. Corporations and are in great danger of Minipulations [sic] and frauds," In his last official report, Williamson pointed to whiskey, debt, and taxes as the chief problems facing the Flandreau people then and in the future. As early as 1875 he had seen the penchant for strong drink as the one exception to their otherwise good conduct, and later he said that there would be no trouble between them and the whites if whiskey were kept out of the country. Their tendency to fall into debt did not distinguish them from their white neighbors, but it constituted a problem for them as it did for the latter. By 1878 they were paying eight hundred dollars a year in taxes--a heavy load for them to bear. Inattention to the principles of sanitation, as practiced by white people, was another source of difficulty among the Indians and accounted for the high mortality, which in some years exceeded the number of births. As frame houses with board floors gradually replaced the log cabins, that problem became less serious. 28 Perhaps the greatest threat to the colony was that a combination of pressures and temptations would induce many of the Indians to sell out. This began happening on an alarming scale about 1879, when Lightner called the commissioner's attention to it. "They are getting nicely started and their lands are becoming valuable," he wrote, "and the Indians have not received more than half price for what they have ____________________ 27 Lightner to Hayt, May 7, 1879, ibid. 28 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 241; 1875, p. 240; 1878, pp. 30-31; Williamson to Hayt, July 3, 1878; Petition of Flandreau Indians to Lightner, July 28, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:54:49 GMT -5
254- disposed of to white men." Those whose lands carried no restrictions could sell out whenever they wished, and those who took claims under the act of 1875 could sell upon the expiration of their five-year restrictive clause. Lightner felt that it would take some effort to make them hold fast. They had by that time 86 homesteads, ranging from 40 to 320 acres and totaling 13,527 acres. About a third, Lightner thought, were progressing, another third were at a standstill, and the rest were retrograding. Few cultivated enough land to live on or to accumulate stock, and consequently they were readily susceptible to the pressures brought upon them to sell out. As Lightner noted, they were not unlike the generality of white pioneers in their willingness to move on when offered what they considered a good price. As a matter of fact, he thought that a higher proportion of the Flandreau Indians had become permanent settlers than of the whites who first settled the area. 29 Still, they were not holding fast in the early 1880's. The population decreased from 365 in 1878 to 221 in 1888, and their acreage went down to 5,042 by 1886, when 234 people remained in the colony. It is not difficult to surmise where the people went who left Flandreau in those years. In 1885 allotment was carried out at Santee, and some returned to take advantage of the opportunity thus afforded. In 1884, Congress began appropriating sums for the support and civilization of small Sioux groups in Minnesota, and many from Flandreau joined these even smaller colonies. Big Eagle, for example, who had been among the leaders of the 1869 exodus from Santee, now migrated again and shortly established himself in the old reservation area. The movement away from Flandreau took place in spite of diligent efforts to provide the Indians with houses, implements, and stock. In 1883, for example, they were issued 128 oxen, 10 bulls, 325 heifers, 320 hogs, and 50 sheep; some of the animals were sold to white farmers. By this time the government was employing not only an Indian overseer and a teacher but also a contract physician and thus was more deeply involved in the affairs of the settlement than ever before. 30 By the later eighties the loss of land became so alarming that the Indian Bureau authorized a per capita payment, made in May, 1887, to help the Indians pay off their mortgages. This was the first of several financial windfalls in which the Flandreau people shared. They received ____________________ 29 Lightner to Hayt, November 26, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1880, p. 122; 1881, p. 128; 1884, p. 124. 30 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 30; 1883, pp. 109-110; 1886, p. 193; 1888, p. 170. -255- substantial benefits from the series of congressional acts relating to the division and sale of the "Great Sioux Reservation," mentioned earlier. In 891 they received $42,000 in lieu of the land they were entitled to under Section 7 of the Sioux act of 1889. The Santee agent reported that they used the money wisely. In 1893 they received a per capita payment amounting to about $7.03 each from proceeds of the sale of the old reservation. The act of June 10, 1896, also brought them financial largess to the extent of $43,516.80 in cash. Perhaps as a result of all these and smaller payments, their numbers began once more to increase, and the Flandreau population hovered around three hundred through the 1890's. 31 The decade of the nineties brought a benefit of another kind to the Flandreau people, although it was not limited to them. Williamson's repeated appeals for a boarding school had met with a cold reception from the Indian Office, and Lightner declined to renew the request, though urged by the Indians to do so. In 1885 he had the day school repaired and painted and the grounds enclosed with a fence and planted with shade trees. Five years later, however, the town of Flandreau was selected as the site for a non-reservation boarding school to serve Indian children in the Dakotas and adjacent states. A quarter section just north of the town was chosen by Santee Agent James E. Helms and the teacher at the day school, Hosea Locke, and purchased by the government for $2,000. The first four buildings of the boarding school were constructed in 1892, at a cost of $52,425-30, and it was put in operation in March, 1893, with the former day school pupils as a nucleus. By the end of the fiscal year the school had an enrollment of ninety-eight, including many students who were not from the local Indian community. 32 Since the Flandreau Indian School has not been identified closely with the Flandreau Santee Sioux colony, its subsequent history does not properly come within the scope of this study; but in its early years it filled an educational need not adequately met by the day school or the district schools which had followed in the wake of white settlement. By the end of the nineteenth century the Flandreau Sioux were better off economically than the other Santees, the Sissetons, or the Devils Lake people. Although they had lost much of their land and were to lose more in the next decades, they had shown a tenacity and ____________________ 31 Ibid., 1887, p. 159 ; 1891, p. 295; 1893, p. 200; 1897, p. 184. 32 Ibid., 1885, pp. 139-140 ; 1892, p. 895; 1893, p. 457; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXVI, 358-359, 1012. -256- ingenuity that helped them overcome apparently insuperable obstacles and become moderately successful. Besides their farming, they had found other ways of earning a living. In 1874 one man held the contract for carrying the mail through Flandreau and received $1,000 a year for his services. Before the turn of the century they were also exploiting the resources of the nearby Pipestone quarry and making pipes, rings, and other articles for sale. They realized an income of $2,250 from the sale of such items in 1888 and doubtless similar amounts in other years for which no figures are available. 33 More important, they had established a reputation for honesty and reliability among their white neighbors. Lightner was probably expressing a view shared by those neighbors when he wrote in 1881 that the Flandreau Indians "pay their taxes promptly, their word can be relied upon, and they make good neighbors." There was factionalism among them, of course, as there is in any group of people. When John Eastman had been appointed teacher at the school, a petition was got up for his removal and his replacement by Walter L. Pettijohn. Upon investigation, the move was found to be the work of Pettijohn's mother, and the charges against Eastman were false, some of the signatures forgeries. 34 Such factionalism did not detract from the essential achievement of the Flandreau people in breaking out of the nest and testing their own wings. If they received government support, those who stayed in the colony used that support on the whole wisely. The amount and kind of help they received from their white neighbors cannot be measured, but it is not likely that it outweighed the advantage taken of them by other whites, nor was the government support given them disproportionate to the handicaps under which they labored as Indians in a frontier community. All things considered, the Flandreau colony in 1900 was the most successful and most securely based of the various fragments into which the Santee Sioux had been dispersed since 1862. ____________________
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:56:24 GMT -5
33 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 242; 1881, p. 306; 1888, p. 173; Lightner to Roland E. Trowbridge, April 2, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. 34 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1881, p. 306; Lightner to Hayt, April 2, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -257- CHAPTER 13 Those Who Stayed OF ALL THE splinter groups into which the Santee Sioux were fragmented after the uprising, none have so quietly dramatic a history as those few who never left Minnesota or who returned to the state after a discreet interval. Defying both hostile public opinion, which persisted long after the outbreak, and the poverty that was their lot for having renounced the benefits extended to the tribe, they hung on at or near their old homes until the government finally, in 1884, extended belated and limited recognition to them. After that their numbers were gradually augmented by migration from outside the state, until by 1960 there were more Santee Sioux living on the small reservations in Minnesota than there were on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. The story of the Santees who stayed behind goes back to 1853, when the bulk of the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes were removed, albeit temporarily, to the reservation on the upper Minnesota. For several years, many of them spent most of their time in their old territory, showing up at the agency only for the annuity payment, and some never did establish residence on the reservation. A few families lingered around Faribault, aided by Alexander Faribault, who helped them send their children to the local schools and gradually merge with the white community. There is evidence that some also hung on in the Wabasha vicinity, perhaps members of that portion of the old Wabasha -258- band who refused to move to the reservation in 1853. The naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau reported seeing "Dacotah shaped wigwams" just below Wabasha when he passed up the Mississippi in the spring of 1861, and several months after the uprising a group of nineteen Sioux who had lived peaceably there all through the hostilities were captured by the military and taken to Fort Snelling. A record kept by the Prairie Island people says that one of their number went up to the Redwood to make maple sugar in the spring of 1862, lingered through the summer, and was caught up in the war that fall. 1 Passing references in newspapers of the 1850's and early 1860's also suggest that many of the lower Sioux remained in the vicinity of their old villages throughout the reservation period. In addition to those who had partly or completely severed their ties with their tribe before the uprising, there was a larger number who were not removed with the main body in 1863. When 1,318 Sioux were shipped out of Fort Snelling that May, 137 were left behind to serve as scouts against the hostile Indians on the frontier. To this figure, which included women and children, must be added an indeterminate number who had testified against their fellows the previous autumn and believed that their lives would be jeopardized if they were forced to rejoin the tribe. 2 The fate of these "friendly Sioux" was a matter of concern, not only to themselves, but to friends of the Indians like Bishop Whipple and General Sibley; even Galbraith expressed concern about what might happen to them if they were made to accompany their tribesmen. On December 18, 1862, a petition was signed by five chiefs of the lower Sioux, five of the upper, and by other braves and headmen, disavowing participation in the uprising and asking that they be permitted to return to the reservation and the farms they had cultivated before the outbreak. The fact that the petitioners were among the very few not tried by the military court the previous fall indicates that their protestations of innocence were sincere. Although Antoine Freniere, a mixed-blood as vindictive as any of the whites, charged that these men merely wanted to return to the reservation in order to dig up plunder they had buried during the fighting, several _______ 1 Central Republican ( Faribault), June 10, 1863; Goodhue County Republican ( Red Wing), January 16, 1863; "History of Prairie Island Sioux, Begun by Thomas Rouillard-Related by Eliza Wells and Translated by Grandson, Norman Richard Campbell," ms, Minnesota Historical Society; Walter Harding, ed., Thoreau's Minnesota Journey: Two Documents ( Geneseo, N.Y.: Thoreau Society, 1962), p. 4. 2 Charles E. Mix to William P. Dole, May 18, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency. -259- prominent citizens were inclined to give them at least the benefit of the doubt. 3 An early version of the bill to abrogate all treaties with the Santee Sioux contained a provision which would have awarded 160 acres of land to each Indian who had helped the whites during the uprising, provided him with agricultural implements, stock, etc., and given him a lifetime annuity of fifty dollars. 4 This clause of the bill was widely denounced in the newspapers, on the ground that Little Crow's case demonstrated that the "good Indian" of today might be the hostile of tomorrow. The Mankato Weekly Record predicted that the signers of the petition--the "pets," as it called them--might in five years be reenacting the scenes of the previous August. "Christianizing Indians has proved an expensive undertaking to Minnesota," wrote editor John C. Wise, "and our people want no more experiments in that line." 5 Despite the opposition, the removal bill that became law on March 3, 1863, contained a provision authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to grant eighty acres of land on the old reservation to "any meritorious individual . . . who exerted himself to save the lives of the whites in the late massacre." No mention was made of any other assistance or annuity. Perhaps because the land itself would be of no use to the Indian without implements, stock, and seed, which he was quite unable to purchase for himself, nothing was done to carry out this provision until 1865, when Congress passed a bill that enabled the Secretary of the Interior to assist the Indians financially in establishing themselves. 6 Meanwhile, the friendly Sioux had been living in extreme poverty, preserved from starvation only by the charity of their white friends. When Sibley's spring campaign of 1863 was about to begin, Bishop Whipple asked him what was to be done with the families of his scouts and the other Indians who had rescued whites. Upon Sibley's reply that they would have to go to the new reservation on the Missouri with the rest of their tribe, the bishop suggested that they be turned over to him and sent to Faribault. An appeal to Alexander Faribault brought an offer of part of his farm as a camping place for these unfortunates. Only Faribault's reputation in the city named for him enabled him to so defy public opinion as to harbor members of the hated Indian race on his ______ 3 54th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Rpt. 1362, pp. 16-17; St. Paul Pioneer, December 14 and 18, 1862. According to Freniere, only one Indian, John Other Day, and two halfbreeds, Joseph Coursoll and Jack Frazer, were free of complicity in the uprising. Someone, probably Sibley, wrote to the Pioneer, denying Freniere's charge. 4 St. Paul Pioneer, January 15, 1863. 5 Mankato Weekly Record, February 7, 1863. 6 U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 819-820; XIII, 427. -260- property. As it was, he was threatened and had to publish in the local newspaper a detailed statement identifying the Indians who were living on his land. None of those camping there in June, 1863, had taken any part in the uprising, he asserted, other than to help the whites escape; some had never lived on the reservation at all; one, a widow, had a son in the Union Army at the time. 7 Although this public notice of the innocence of Faribault's guests prevented any violence that might have been planned, the four years that the Indians lived on his land were not altogether pleasant ones, for either him or them. They had no money, and their attempts to raise crops were largely unsuccessful. Faribault, who owned a mill, employed them when he could and sustained them by outright charity the rest of the time. They dug and sold ginseng, which had a certain popularity at the time, until the land had been so dug over that several years would be required for the ginseng to recover. They were not allowed to dig on other people's land. At the beginning of April, 1866, Faribault presented a claim for $3,871.44 to the government, partially covering his expenditures since March 1, 1863. His account included such items as "One coffin for child--$6.00" and "One coffin for son--$12." 8 His claim was eventually honored by the government, but it is unlikely that Faribault, who died in comparative poverty himself, was ever fully compensated for his generosity to his Sioux relatives. The bill passed by Congress and approved February 9, 1865, was due largely to the exertions of Bishop Whipple, who made six trips to Washington at his own expense on behalf of the Sioux in Minnesota and elsewhere. Called "An Act for the Relief of certain Friendly Indians of the Sioux Nation, in Minnesota," it noted that these Indians were destitute because of their services to the whites in 1862, authorized the President to investigate their condition and "make such provision for their welfare as their necessities and future protection may require," and appropriated $7,500, one third of which was to be paid to John Other Day, the rest to " such other Indians as shall appear specially entitled thereto, for their friendly, extraordinary, and gallant services in rescuing white settlers from massacre in Minnesota." 9 ______ 7 Henry B. Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate ( New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), pp. 133-134; Central Republican, June 10, 1863. 8 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 235; Alexander Ramsey to Secretary of the Interior, enclosing Faribault's account dated April 1, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. 9 Henry B. Whipple to Lewis V. Bogy, December 25, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; U.S. Statutes at Large, XIII, 427. -261- The determination of who was to share in the appropriation took some time and the actual distribution even longer, but action toward carrying out the provision for the Indians' welfare began almost at once. In the absence of Bishop Whipple, who was in Europe, his protégé, Samuel D. Hinman, immediately began agitating to have the government fulfill the clause in the removal act that provided for eighty-acre farms on the old reservation to be granted to the friendly Sioux. Hinman, in Washington at the time, wrote Commissioner Dole on March 15, 1865, asking that twelve sections of land be withdrawn from pre-emption and sale until each deserving head of family had received the allotment promised in 1863. Two days later the Secretary of the Interior authorized him to select the lands to be reserved. The tract Hinman proposed to locate his Indians on was on the south bank of the Minnesota River, in the vicinity of the old agency, including what is today the Lower Sioux Indian Community. Hinman was authorized to gather and establish the Indians on these lands, and Superintendent Clark W. Thompson was instructed to spend $800 to buy farm implements and seeds and to have lands plowed for the Indians. 10 Although Hinman must surely have realized that there would be widespread public sentiment in Minnesota hostile to such a scheme as he envisioned, he went blithely ahead with the plan and collected at Faribault as many Indians as he could preparatory to establishing them on their lands. At this point his efforts were abruptly halted. General Sibley wrote him late in April that he had received orders from General John Pope forbidding any settlement of Indians on the old reservation without further orders from Pope or from higher authority. Even at this point the opposition of the whites might have been overcome but for the sudden revival of anti-Indian feeling that followed the murder by a small party of half-breeds of a family living south of Mankato. On the second day of May this group of renegades, led by John Campbell, a son of old Scott Campbell and a deserter from the Union Army, fell upon the Andrew Jewett family and killed or fatally wounded all four members of the family. A few days later Campbell was taken into custody on suspicion, subjected to a brief and somewhat irregular trial, and summarily hanged on the present site of the Blue Earth County courthouse. Although Campbell and his companions _______ 10 Samuel D. Hinman to Dole, March 15, 1865; Secretary of Interior John P. Usher to Dole, March 17, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LR; Dole to Hinman, March 23, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LS. -262- were outlaws primarily and Indians only secondarily, the savagery of their behavior led to such an upsurge of hatred for all Indians as to render impracticable any further efforts to locate the friendly Sioux on their old reservation. There followed an exchange of letters between Pope, backed by Sibley, and General Ulysses S. Grant, with the result that Grant finally sustained Pope's action in forbidding Hinman to proceed further with his plan. Grant remarked, with a degree of detachment not possible to those closer to the scene, that perhaps the Indians needed protection from the whites as much as the whites needed protection from the Indians. 11 Thus ended the first and only really serious attempt in the sixties to let the Sioux return to their old reservation. On the chance that another attempt might be made, however, the citizens of Minnesota made known their opposition through appropriate channels. On February 28 of the following year a joint resolution of the state legislature and a memorial to the Secretary of the Interior were submitted in protest against the rumored proposal to settle "certain meritorious Indians upon our frontier." It complained that such Indians would have intercourse with the hostiles on the plains who had been harassing the Minnesota frontier since 1862. Furthermore, said the memorial, "The experience has shown, that even under ordinary circumstances a settlement of Indians in a body among whites is very detrimental and injurious both to the Indians and whites." Although the whites were said to entertain the kindest feelings toward these Indians individually, they insisted that the lands in question be opened to settlement. 12 The inconsistency of their argument and the absurdity of the prediction that Indians who had remained in Minnesota out of fear of the hostiles would now make common cause with the latter may have been noticed by the Secretary of the Interior, but he took no further action to settle the friendly Indians on the lands chosen for them by Hinman. The failure of Hinman's plan left Alexander Faribault reluctantly footing the bill for the support of the Sioux on his land, with no ______ 11 Henry H. Sibley to Hinman, April 27, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LR; Mankato Weekly Union, May 5, 1865; Thomas Hughes, History of Blue Earth County ( Chicago: Middle West Publishing Co., [ 1901]), pp. 149-154; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, First Series, Vol. 48, Pt. 2, pp. 347, 359, 367, 480. The story of the attempt to settle the Indians on their old reservation is summarized in Hinman to Whipple, May 30, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. 12 Joint Resolution of the Minnesota State Legislature and Memorial to the Secretary of the Interior, March 16, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. -263- certainty of ever being reimbursed by the government. Besides presenting his claim, he requested in the spring of 1866 that the Indians be removed from his land and otherwise provided for. They were doing irreparable damage to his standing timber, and this he knew he would never be compensated for. 13 So long as the main body of the Santees were at Crow Creek, there was an understandable reluctance to send those in Minnesota to rejoin their tribesmen, but when the Crow Creek people had been removed to the Niobrara, supposedly a satisfactory home, pressure for the removal of the remnants at Faribault and elsewhere became stronger. Sibley wrote the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dennis N. Cooley, in April, 1866, that, with the exception of eight men and their families, these people would be willing to go to the new reservation and should be removed in time to plant crops there that season. The next month their removal was authorized by the Secretary of the Interior, but for reasons not clear no action was taken at that time, and by the first of June the plan had been temporarily abandoned. 14 Since the Indians were not going to be removed as Sibley had recommended, the Indian Office decided to make temporary provision for them and to investigate their situation more thoroughly before taking further action. As soon as the altered intention of the government was known, Bishop Whipple set the Indians to work plowing some thirty or forty acres of Faribault's land, on which they put in a crop of corn, potatoes, and vegetables. The expenses, over a hundred dollars, were borne by the bishop himself, though Faribault continued to give what financial aid he could. The Department of the Interior also appointed a special agent, Shubael P. Adams, to investigate the condition of the Indians, submit suggestions for action, and attend to the distribution of the $7,500 appropriated by Congress the previous year. Adams arrived at Faribault late in June and spent several weeks collecting information on the "Scattered Sioux," as they came to be called. 15 Adams found that there were 374 Sioux in Minnesota, including ______ 13 Ramsey to James Harlan, March 10, 1866; Alexander Faribault to Secretary of the Interior, June 2, 1866; Hinman to Whipple, April 6, 1866; Hinman to Secretary of the Interior, March 29, 1866, ibid. 14 Sibley to Dennis N. Cooley, April 13, 1866; Harlan to Cooley, May 5, 1866; Whipple to Harlan, June 1, 1866, ibid. In his official report Cooley gave the "various delays" as the reason for not removing the Indians that spring. See Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 46. 15 Cooley to Whipple, June 12, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 235. -264- those at Big Stone Lake, who spent part of their time in Dakota Territory. He found 65 at Faribault, 12 at Wabasha (most of whom had fled from Crow Creek that spring), 158 on the Yellow Medicine and at the scouts' camp about seventy miles south of there, and 139 at the head of Big Stone Lake. More than half of them were mixed-bloods. Those at the scouts' camp received rations (but no pay) and spent a good share of their time hunting; except for about 40, he did not recommend their removal to Niobrara. Likewise, those at the Yellow Medicine, some of whom were farming, and those at Big Stone Lake constituted no annoyance to white settlers where they were and might well be left there. The Faribault and Wabasha groups, however, lived mostly on charity, having no hunting grounds and being able to raise only a small part of their necessities. Adams said, probably incorrectly, that they had no attachment to their present locations and were willing, even anxious in many cases, to go to the Niobrara. 16 On the strength of Adams' recommendations, it was decided to remove the Indians that year, and Alexander Faribault was designated, at Bishop Whipple's and Sibley's suggestion, to do the job. His appointment did not reach him, however, until early in September, which he regarded as too late in the season for such an operation. The Indians were scattered around the woods, some of them gathering wild rice, and assembling them would take a considerable time. For these reasons, as well as on the grounds of poor health, Faribault declined the appointment but expressed a readiness to remove the Indians the next spring, provided the compensation were raised from five to ten dollars a day. 17 So another winter passed without any action toward the removal of the friendly Sioux. These people were somewhat better provided for during the winter of 1866-1867 than in previous years, for some of them had received their shares of the $7,500 Adams had been ordered to disburse. The selection of those who were to receive the money was a difficult task. Bishop Whipple had the primary responsibility, but he enlisted the aid of the other missionaries, such as Riggs and the Williamsons, General Sibley, and everyone else who had personal knowledge of the circumstances. A list containing thirty-six names was finally submitted to Commissioner Cooley in June, 1866, and approved by him soon afterward. Besides such well-known individuals as Other Day (whose share ________ 16 Shubael P. Adams to Cooley, August 10, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. 17 Sibley to Cooley, August 9, 1866; Harlan to Cooley, August 29, 1866; Faribault to Cooley, September 9, 1866; Orville Browning to Cooley, September 26, 1866, ibid. -265- of $2,500 Bishop Whipple thought outrageously large), Taopi, Lorenzo Lawrence, and Paul Mazakutemane, the list included eleven names suggested by Sibley; they were men who had performed no acts of marked heroism but who had by their moderating influence helped prevent the slaughter of the white captives. Adams did not disburse the money himself, but delegated Dr. Jared W. Daniels of Faribault to perform that part of the job. Daniels paid the Faribault Indians at once, in the fall of 1866, a few more the next winter, and nearly all the rest the following spring. Those who received the money early enough bought seed and tools and set about farming in the summer of 1867. 18 Since those at Faribault had been assured that they would be removed the next summer, they apparently spent their money for food and other necessities. Alexander Faribault reported in the fall of 1866 that they were well supplied with provisions for the winter. Their condition was by no means enviable, however. They were still living in the worn-out tipis they had owned before the uprising, they had had no new blankets nor much clothing for four years, and their crops the previous summer had been washed out by a freshet. Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a lecture tour that winter, visited their encampment "in a wild piece of timber" late in January. In a letter to his daughter Ellen, he told of entering one of their tipis, in the company of Faribault's son, and finding them sitting on the ground, about to eat their supper, which was placed on a board. In one tent two young girls were singing psalms in Dakota. Emerson, nurtured on the romantic ideal of the early nineteenth century, regretted that " the light was not birch-bark nor pine-knot, but a kerosene lamp." 19 The next spring Secretary of Interior Orville Browning authorized Superintendent Edward B. Taylor to have the Minnesota Sioux removed to the Santee Reservation under Hinman's supervision. No sooner had the news that they were to be removed become generally known than a chorus of protests arose, emanating primarily from those Indians who had all along objected to joining their tribesmen, but echoed also by some people who might have been expected to rejoice at the prospect. Not only were objections received from such friends of the Indians as Stephen R. Riggs, Thomas S. Williamson, and ex-Senator ______ 18 Whipple to Cooley, June 2, 1866; S. P. Adams to Cooley, June 26, 1866; Jared W. Daniels to Cooley, August 24, 1866, and June 10 and August 31, 1868, ibid. 19 Faribault to Cooley, September 9, 1866; Whipple to Bogy, December 25, 1866, ibid.; Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), V, 493. -266-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:56:59 GMT -5
Henry M. Rice, but similar sentiments were expressed by Governor William R. Marshall, former Governor Ramsey, and sixty-one citizens of Faribault, who signed a petition asking that certain members of the group there be permitted to stay. The principal objection was the compulsory nature of the proposed removal. Riggs asked that the order be modified so as to permit those who wished to stay to do so. Governor Marshall thought it an injustice that Indians who were farming and were "to all intents and purposes . . . citizens" should be removed against their will. Rice pointed out that "to send them amoung [sic] their own people whom they opposed and openly fought during the Indian war would be, I fear, sending them to their graves." His rather visionary recommendation was that they be sent to some place suitable to them and unobjectionable to the whites. 20 As might be expected, the most moving of the pleas came from the Indians themselves. Accompanying one of Governor Marshall's letters was an undated petition from Taopi and six others, partly in the handwriting of Bishop Whipple and bearing evidences of his literary style throughout. Pathetically the petitioners begged, Reward not we beseech thee our father our loyalty by delivering us up to the vengeance of our enemies We are but a little band all that remains of a once powerful nation upon the soil which was the hunting grounds of our fathers We shall need but a little space but for a little while Our white brothers now lords of soil once ours should not deny us this little boon. 21 When the removal was finally carried out, in July, 1867, it was voluntary, although the Indians who chose not to leave were informed that no further provisions for their removal at government expense would be made. Hinman left the Santee Agency June 10 and arrived twelve days later at Faribault, from which base he visited all the Indian groups in southern Minnesota and took a census of them. This proved more difficult than he expected, for some of the Indians kept moving back and forth between the Missouri River and the Redwood area. Since the Sissetons and Wahpetons now had a reservation of their own, he omitted them from his figures, though they had accounted for the great majority of those Adams had found the previous year. Except for three lodges ____________________ 20 Browning to Edward B. Taylor, April 19, 1867; Stephen R. Riggs to Browning, March 11, 1867; Henry M. Rice to Browning, April 10, 1867; William R. Marshall to E. B. Taylor, April 18, 1867; Ramsey to Whipple, July 6, 1867; petition from Faribault citizens, July 30, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR. 21 Petition from Taope [sic], et al., (undated), accompanying letter of Marshall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 29, 1867, ibid. -267- whom Colonel Sam McPhail, proprietor of the town of Redwood Falls, had permitted to live in that vicinity, all the upper Sioux had been ordered away to their reservation. Hinman found seventy-five Sioux at Faribault, two at Mendota, four at Wabasha, and one lodge above Fort Snelling. All those at Faribault seemed willing to go except Taopi and his relatives and another man who had bought land in the vicinity. Those at Mendota and near Fort Snelling were cultivating large fields under the protection of their friends and relatives who were citizens, and they had no wish to leave. Two of the four at Wabasha seemed willing to leave but were deterred by the others, including one who lived across the river in Wisconsin. Hinman also learned that John Bluestone had bought a farm near Shakopee and was doing well at farming. All of these people he left behind. Those he took with him to Santee numbered five lodges, or thirty-nine individuals--slightly more than half the number at Faribault. Because of flooding due to recent rains, Hinman and his party had a miserable trip to Nebraska, but they arrived safely on August 15, exactly a month after their departure.22 Although the Hinman expedition of 1867 marked the end of the long struggle to remove the Sioux from Minnesota, it did not end efforts to locate the remnant on their old reservation. The next spring Bishop Whipple wrote to Sibley and to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs asking that Taopi and his friends be granted eighty-acre tracts there. Taopi he described as "poor, homeless, destitute, and yet worthy of our gratitude for rescuing our captives." 23 The wheels again ground slowly; and in May, 1869, Whipple was authorized to make new selections, not to exceed twelve sections of land, in a locality where there would be no conflict between the white settlers and the Indians. By this time, of course, it was difficult to find any land on the old reservation that had not been occupied by whites. Even in 1865, when Hinman had first tried to locate the Indians there, he was told that several pre-emption claims had been made on the tract chosen by him. In 1869 the land then withdrawn from sale was restored to the market, and now there was nothing available below the Yellow Medicine. McPhail, asked by Bishop Whipple to examine the country above there, was able to find only two suitable locations, one at the extreme western end of the old reservation, on the Dakota border, the other at the foot of Big Stone Lake. Since ____________________ 22 Hinman to Hampton B. Denman, August 20, 1867, ibid. See also Central Republican, July 17, 1867. 23 Whipple to Sibley, April 7, 1868; Whipple to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, April 30, 1868; Sibley to Browning, April 20, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR. -268- both of them were close to the new Sisseton Reservation, the bishop suggested that Sisseton Agent Daniels be given charge of such Indians as might be placed there. 24 Nothing came of this scheme. It would not have helped Taopi in any case, for he had died on February 19, 1869, after falling ill on a hunting trip far north of St. Paul and returning to Faribault to die. He had earlier told Bishop Whipple that he expected never to have another home except his grave. 25 The rest of the little colony at Faribault stayed on, generally accepted by their white neighbors and gradually rising out of the abject poverty that had characterized their early years. In 1884 the Faribault Democrat presented a rather favorable picture of them: Here in Faribault there are a number of Indian families, who have comfortable homes, and clothed in the garments of civilization, provide for themselves as do their white neighbors. They are all faithful Christians and every Sunday, no matter what the weather, finds them in their places in the Cathedral and at least once a month reverentially kneeling at the altar to receive the Holy Communion. 26 Less than five years later they left Faribault to join the newly established colony near the old agency site, where Hinman helped them to build a church and where the largest of the Sioux enclaves in Minnesota today is situated. During the sixteen years after Hinman's removal of those at Faribault, the history of the Sioux in Minnesota is almost a total blank. The government having no further obligations toward them, they are scarcely mentioned in the correspondence of the Indian Bureau. It appears, however, that the fifty or so remaining in the state when Hinman removed the rest in 1867 were joined in succeeding years by a good many who preferred the risks of independence in their old homeland to the security of reservation life. Once the initiative had been taken by the people who went to Flandreau in 1869, others followed their example, ____________________ 24 Secretary of Interior Jacob D. Cox to Ely S. Parker, May 25, 1869; Joseph W. Wilson, Commissioner of the General Land Office, to Cox, May 27, 1869; Parker to Whipple, June 11, 1869; Samuel McPhail to Whipple, August 24, 1869; Whipple to Parker, September 1, 1869, ibid. 25 Central Republican, March 3, 1869; William Welsh, comp., Taopi and His Friends, or the Indians' Wrongs and Rights ( Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Heffelfinger, 1869), pp. 53-54; George C. Tanner, Fifty Years of Church Work in the Diocese of Minnesota 1857-19O7 ( St. Paul: Published by The Committee, 1909), p. 401. 26 Faribault Democrat, June 27, 1884. -269- choosing to migrate all the way to Minnesota, where they were later joined by some of the Flandreau colonists. The 1870 census showed 175 Indians, nearly all of whom were presumably Sioux, scattered through the southern counties. Aside from 34 in Chippewa County, probably the remnants of the scouts' camp, the largest concentrations were at Faribault and Traverse des Sioux, with smaller groups at Bloomington (the residence of Gideon Pond), in the Shakopee-Prior Lake area, and on Grey Cloud Island in Washington County. The number continued to increase in subsequent years, until in 1883 a special census revealed 237 Sioux in Minnesota. 27 Only once between 1867 and 1883 was a serious attempt made to bring the Minnesota Sioux back within the pale of government benefits. Late in 1875 the Reverend David Buel Knickerbacker, rector of Gethsemane church in Minneapolis, wrote Commissioner Edward P. Smith in behalf of the Sioux Indians then living at Mendota, Shakopee, and elsewhere in the state. He estimated their numbers at perhaps 125 or 150, of whom 75 were living at Mendota. He described them as industrious, temperate, and honest, all professing Christians. Besides cultivating about ten acres of land and collecting wild rice, they supported themselves by making moccasins and working on farms during harvest. The church helped supply them with clothing and provisions. The land they occupied at Mendota was owned by Sibley, who offered to donate a few acres if the government would buy some more and put up a few small houses. Knickerbacker believed that $500 a year judiciously expended would protect them from want in the winter, and they would soon be independent. "It seems impossible to persuade them to leave here to go to their people in Nebraska," he remarked, indicating that their removal was still regarded as a desirable solution to the problem. 28 Commissioner Smith replied that, although these people had treaty rights at the Flandreau, Sisseton, or Santee agencies, it would probably be best to leave them where they were rather than try to remove them. There were unfortunately no funds available to help them in their present locations, except possibly the civilization fund, which was running low. All he was willing to suggest was that perhaps the Bureau ____________________ 27 A. T. Andreas, ed., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Minnesota ( Chicago: Lakeside Building, 1874), pp. 14-15; "Memorial Notices of Rev. Gideon H. Pond," Minnesota Historical Collections, III ( 1870- 1880), 371. 28 David B. Knickerbacker to Edward P. Smith, October 13, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -270- could help them if Sibley would provide them with the land he had offered. 29 Knickerbacker wrote back that Sibley would sell about one hundred acres for $2,000, less $200 which he would deduct as his donation in place of the ten or twenty acres promised. The commissioner's line had hardened by this time, however, and the project went no further. He replied early in 1876 that he considered the proposed purchases an expense not justified by the financial condition of the Indian Office at the time. He added, rather sharply, "I do not recognize that these Indians, failing to comply with previous requirements as to their removal, have any claim upon this office. If they choose the privileges of independence, they must also assume its burdens." 30 Information on the Sioux in Minnesota during the seventies is scarce indeed. Yet it is evident, from scattered references in newspapers and Indian Bureau correspondence, that some were more or less permanent residents in the Red Wing and Wabasha areas and that others paid periodic visits to their old homes. 31 A Dakota County history published in 1881 provides the information that there were a few Indians living there at that time. The picture it gives of the Mendota colony is not as favorable as that offered by the Reverend Knickerbacker. The settlement then consisted of an encampment of seven tipis, containing, when visited, thirty-five women and children and only one or two men; the rest of the men were away hunting in Dakota Territory. They lived in a "primitive and savage manner" and were said to "speak no English, ____________________ 29 E. P. Smith to Knickerbacker, October 21, 1875, ibid. 30 Knickerbacker to E. P. Smith, November 22, 1875; E. P. Smith to Knickerbacker, January 20, 1876, ibid. 31 In 1877, Santee Agent Isaiah Lightner wrote Commissioner Smith that Charles Hedges, an industrious Indian, had bought some land near Red Wing and wished to take with him the property issued him by the government. Lightner thought there would be a number of his charges going to Minnesota. The same year the Red Wing Argus complained of the number of drunken Indians seen almost daily on the streets, but the editor was more concerned about where they were getting the stuff than with the convenience of future historians, and he provided no further information. There were Indians at Wabasha two years later, when Francis Talbot, an old trader who had worked under Alexis Bailly, inquired about getting an appointment as trader at Santee. He professed to be well known to "some of the chiefs there and their relatives here [at Wabasha]." In the spring of 1879 and again in the fall small parties of Indians passed through Lake City on their way to Wabasha; the second party was made up of three squaws, one brave, three broken-down horses, one papoose, and "one gamin of a brave," according to the Cannon Falls Beacon. See Lightner to John Q. Smith, May 16, 1877, and Francis Talbot to Superintendent of Indian Bureau, January 27, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Red Wing Argus, June 28, 1877; Cannon Falls Beacon, March 7 and September 12, 1879. -271- profess no religion and own no land." It treated another group more generously. These were "the few quiet people who cultivate a little land on the bottoms below Hastings, and sell pipes and beadwork to the whites. They are regular attendants of the Episcopal church." Their principal man was Ma-pi-awa-con-sa, locally known as Indian John. 32 The picture we get from these varied sources is that of a people striving for obscurity, a goal which the whites were perfectly willing to help them attain. Their poverty was due not so much to laziness, as the whites charged, as to economic and cultural handicaps which unfitted them for competition with the white population and obliged them to live on the fringes of society, the objects of charity, contempt, or, at best, good-natured condescension. Too few to be feared any longer, they were looked upon by their white neighbors much as the village idiot might be: harmless, useless, a burden to society. Although the whites doubtless wished the government or some other agency would take upon itself responsibility for the Indians' support, they were really not a big enough burden to cause much concern. If they had been picturesque, they might have been more popular; then they could have put on war dances at county fairs and Fourth of July celebrations, as some of them later did. But for the most part they were not picturesque but pitiably drab, people the community would just as soon not have strangers see. Fortunately, as the white settlers saw it, the Indian was said to be the vanishing race; no doubt these little encampments of aborigines would soon die off. ____________________ 32 Edward D. Neill, History of Dakota County and the City of Hastings ( Minneapolis: North Star Publishing Co., 1881), pp. 195-196. -272- CHAPTER 14 Up from Oblivion THE SIOUX in Minnesota did not vanish, nor were the white people of the state permitted to forget them. In fact, as people from Santee and from the Flandreau and Brown Earth colonies drifted back, perhaps only temporarily at first, then settled down to stay, their numbers gradually increased. The returnees were as mixed in their motives as they were in their origins. Some left Santee because they resented living under the authority of an Indian agent. Some fled the reservation because, like the Flandreau colonists, they wanted to dissociate themselves from the tribe. Some of them no doubt sincerely wished to take up farms and live like white men; unfortunately, not all were qualified by experience or temperament for the life of a farmer, competing with white farmers. Some had tried farming at Flandreau or Brown Earth, had lost their lands in mortgages or sold them for a pittance, and now wanted to try again, in a country where a crop was somewhat more certain. More than a few of those who came back were mere restless drifters who would never have succeeded anywhere. Whatever their motives, all these people had one characteristic in common with the Europeans who emigrated to America in the same period: they were dissatisfied where they were and hoped to better their lot somewhere else. The special census of 1883 showed that they numbered 237, scattered -273- throughout the southern third of the state. None of the fourteen localities in which they had settled accounted for many families. The largest, Shakopee, had eleven families, or forty-seven individuals; the second largest, near Wabasha, had nine families, or forty individuals. Thirtythree were camped on Grey Cloud Island, twenty-four at Mendota, and twenty at Bloomington. The other groups were even smaller: six families at Faribault, three at Hastings and Redwood, two at Red Wing, one each at Prior Lake, Kapozha, West St. Paul, and St. Peter, and four families at Maiden Rock, Wisconsin. 1 Most of them lived in tipis, set up on the lands of white men who did not object to the Indians' presence. Some had made down payments on land which they were trying to farm with inadequate equipment. One of them was Good Thunder, one of the heroes of the uprising, who had appeared in July, 1883, near the site of the old Redwood agency. Later that year a few more tipis were seen on the bluff overlooking the Minnesota River, and in the spring of 1884 Good Thunder, who had sold his Flandreau homestead for $400 and a team of horses, bought eighty acres of land for $694.2 His example was followed by Charles Lawrence, who bought an adjacent eighty, and within a few years quite a little colony had formed, consisting mostly of more or less uninvited guests who set up their tipis on the lands of their more affluent relatives. Located across the Minnesota from the old Birch Coulee battle site and from the town of Morton (called Birch Cooley post office until 1894), this Indian community was commonly called Birch Coulee. The manner in which the Birch Coulee settlement began was probably to some extent typical of the way all of the colonies started. A few brave souls took the leap, and others followed. For the most part, these people were wretchedly poor. Few had land enough to farm successfully, and those who did lacked the necessary stock and equipment. So they depended largely on the bounty of their white neighbors for their survival and thus did not endear themselves to those neighbors, whose attitude toward Indians was conditioned by what they had seen, or perhaps only heard, of the 1862 Uprising. Old friends of the Sioux, such ____________________ 1 List of Dacotah Indians in Minnesota, October 1, 1883, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sioux in Minnesota file. Unless otherwise indicated, all Indian Office documents cited in this chapter are in the file labeled "Sioux in Minnesota" rather than included under any particular agency. 2 J. G. Larsen, "Indian Mission Dates from 1860," Morton ( Minn.) Enterprise, February 27, 1936; Benjamin W. Thompson to John D. C. Atkins, December 31, 1885, and January 2, 1886, NARS, RG 75, LR; Redwood County Register of Deeds, Deed Record 10, p. 301. -274-
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