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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:24:30 GMT -5
Another source of difficulty in the 1840's was the increasing power that the traders came to wield over the Indians. The conditions under which they operated were radically altered during this period. The supply of furs dwindled rapidly, and the Indians, blessed with annuities, no longer hunted as assiduously as they had earlier. Instead of trading manufactured goods for peltries, the traders now exchanged them for the money the Indians were receiving. Credit was still extended liberally, since the traders had learned that debts owed by Indians could be collected from the government by means of a properly constructed treaty. As the ceded lands cast of the Mississippi filled with settlers, a fierce tug-of-war began between the so-called independent traders, many of whom were chiefly dispensers of whiskey, and the licensed traders of the old American Fur Company. On the whole, the independent traders did the most harm to the Indians, whose addiction to whiskey brought them to new depths of degradation. Gideon Pond has left a striking description of the orgy that followed the payment in 1839, when the Indians bade fair to die, all together, in one drunken jumble. They must be drunk-they could hardly live if they were not drunk.--Many of them seemed as uneasy when sober, as a fish does when on land. At some of the villages they were drunk months together. There was no end to it. They would have whisky. They would give guns, blankets, pork, lard, flour, corn, coffee, sugar, horses, furs, traps, any thing for whisky. It was made to drink--it was good --it was wakan. They drank it,--they bit off each other's noses,--broke each other's ribs and heads, they knifed each other. They killed one another with guns, knives, hatchets, clubs, fire-brands; they fell into the fire and water and were burned to death, and drowned; they froze to death, and committed suicide so frequently, that for a time, the death of an Indian in some of the ways mentioned was but little thought of by themselves or others. 47 Like the white man's liquor, his diseases wrought havoc among the Indians. Smallpox struck in the middle 1830's, and in 1846 and 1847 cholera and "bilious fever" raged through the river villages, "carrying [the Indians] off at a fearful rate," according to Bruce. Whooping cough was also a widely prevalent ailment and accounted for many deaths, especially among children. 48 Yet the Mdewakantons, the only ____________________ 47 Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 209, citing "The Treaty with the Mdewakantonwan and Warpekute Bands of Dakotas," Dakota Tawaxitku Kin, or the Dakota Friend, I, No. 11 ( St. Paul, September 1851). 48 26th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 126, p. 495; 30th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 8, p. 844; Bruce to Harvey, August 21, 1847, NARS, RG 75, LR. -68- band receiving annuities and thus the only one for which reasonably accurate figures are available, continued to increase throughout the 1840's. From 1,668 in 1839 they increased to 1,776 in 1841, and 1,938 in 1843. Despite the cholera epidemic, they were up to 2,141 in 1846 and to 2,200 in 1849. It is impossible to determine how much of this population growth is due to natural increase and how much to accessions from the non-annuity bands, but it is unlikely that the Mdewakantons would welcome sizable additions to their numbers, since these would reduce their per capita benefits. Figures for the other subtribes are unreliable, but in 1846 Bruce reported 555 Wahpekutes, 862 Wahpetons, and 1,188 Sissetons, plus some mixed Sisseton and Yankton bands numbering altogether 2,612. 49 Another obstacle to the agents' and missionaries' efforts to civilize the Sioux was the fondness of the Indians for war with their neighbors. The conflict with the Chippewas abated only briefly after the spectacular bloodshed in 1839, but the possible withholding of annuities provided the government officials with a new weapon. Still, nonannuity bands kept up the fight during the forties. Peace was made with the Sacs and Foxes in 1844, but trouble with the Winnebagos, now living in northeastern Iowa, began about that time and erupted in open attack by some Wahpekutes in 1847. The Sioux played an obstructionist role in the removal of the Winnebagos to central Minnesota in 1848, when Wabasha entertained the migrating tribe and offered them some land near his village. Another source of difficulty came from the invasion of the Sioux hunting grounds by half-breeds from the Red River settlements in Canada, who killed off the bison on which the prairie Sioux depended. Retaliation led in at least one case to the deaths of two innocent white men bringing a drove of cattle from Missouri to Fort Snelling. 50 Despite all these obstacles, Bruce managed the St. Peter's Agency ____________________ 49 28th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 377 ; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 1017; Statistical table of Sioux bands, September 1, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR. 50 Bruce to Chambers, August 4, 1843; Chambers to Crawford, August 12, 1843; Bruce to Chambers, April 2, 1844; Chambers to Crawford, April 18, 1844; Bruce to Chambers, June 12, 1844; and July 1, 1845; Bruce to Medill, August 15, 1847; Henry M. Rice to Medill, April 3 and June 25, 1848; Bruce to Chambers, February 18, 1844; Bruce to Harvey, July 26, 1847; Bruce to Medill, August 12, 1847; Medill to Harvey, September 4 and 6, 1847; Chambers to Crawford, September 3, 1844; Bruce to Chambers, October 2 and November 2, 1844; ibid.; Russell Blakeley, "History of the Discovery of the Mississippi River and the Advent of Commerce in Minnesota," Minnesota Historical Collections, VIII ( 1895-1898), 382 - 385. -69- with reasonable success during his term of office. He weathered several attempts to have him removed, first by a Methodist missionary who accused him of being a "profane, dram-drinking agent" and of favoring the Catholics, and later by the independent traders and citizens allied with them, who charged him with favoring the licensed traders. 51 But in 1848 the agency was reduced to a subagency, as an economy move, and Robert G. Murphy became subagent. During Murphy's brief term of office--he was removed in favor of Nathaniel McLean, publisher of a Whig newspaper in St. Paul, in 1849--his chief accomplishment was reducing the amount of drunkenness among the Indians by the unlikely but apparently partially effective device of a temperance pledge. 52 Momentous events were occurring in the land of the Sioux during the later 1840's. Minnesota Territory was created in the spring of 1849 and Alexander Ramsey of Pennsylvania appointed governor. In executing his function as ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs, a responsibility which he took with much seriousness, Ramsey made his first report to the commissioner a veritable compendium of historical and ethnological information on the Indians of the territory. 53 As if to demonstrate beyond all question that civilization was moving in on the Santee Sioux, in April, 1849, a young lawyer named James ____________________ 51 Bruce to Crawford, June 14, 1842; Sibley to Crawford, October 31, 1842; Abstract of charges against Bruce, December 6, 1842; B. T. Kavanaugh to Charles A. Wickliffe, April 14, 1842; Petition of Sioux, prepared by H. Jackson, to President John Tyler [no date, but postmarked October 10, 1844]; Crawford to Secretary of War William Wilkins, October 31, 1844; Bruce to Crawford, February 7, 1845; Settlers' petition, n.d., accompanied by affidavits from Scott Campbell, April 9, 1846, and William Evans, April 9, 1846, NARS, RG 75, LR. Kavanaugh lived to regret his accusations against Bruce, for they elicited a countercharge from the trader Henry Hastings Sibley and other men, who offered sworn testimony that Kavanaugh had been guilty of voyeurism in drilling holes through the partition separating his stateroom from that occupied by the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Steele on the steamboat Amaranth. Kavanaugh left the mission that fall and later underwent an investigation by the officials of his church. Scott Campbell's testimony was evidently related to a grudge he bore Bruce, who had dismissed him for intemperance in the spring of 1843. The settler's petition, which his affidavit supported, charged Bruce with refusing to honor claims of private citizens against the government for damages done by the Indians, while paying those of the American Fur Company without question. Henry Jackson, one of the independent traders, was the first signer of this petition. 52 Medill to Robert G. Murphy, May 6, 1848, and Medill to Bruce, May 6, 1848, NARS, RG 75, LS; Secretary of the Interior to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 6,1849, NARS, RG 75, LR; 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 1049-1050; Minnesota Pioneer ( St. Paul), August 23, 1849. The agent's salary was $1,500, a subagent's, $750. 53 His report is contained in 31st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, pp. 1005-1117. -70- Madison Goodhue arrived in St. Paul with a printing press and proceeded to start the first newspaper in the territory, the Minnesota Pioneer. Goodhue was a highly articulate man, and, unlike some frontier editors, he entered upon his task with no strong prejudices against Indians. Goodhue's detailed account of the annuity payment in September, 1849, is the first by an observer sufficiently detached to be conscious of the color and pageantry of the ceremony. On the Saturday preceding the payment the Indians from Wacouta's and Wabasha's bands "came up the river with their hundred canoes, the paddles sparkling in the sunshine, and moored their multitudinous fleet to the island [below St. Paul], and fastened their bows to the beach." In ten minutes they had their canoes unloaded and were cutting and trimming willow poles for their tipis. In two or three hours they had more than forty erected, "and in the warm sunshine of an Indian summer day, the picture resting upon a rich back-ground of forest-trees now turning yellow, was really delightful." Sunday evening they left their encampment and embarked for the fort. Goodhue described the scene there with all the eye for detail of Parkman or Catlin: The Indians are seen straggling along the road--the males, with bows and arrows, pipes and guns--the females, laboring under huge packs of luggage slung by a strap across the forehead. Upon the ground about the Agency at Fort Snelling, while awaiting their turns for the hard handful of silver dollars, they are seen in every posture--some reclining in their tents (or lodges)--some a sitting on a rail--some stretched on their bellies and lazily picking at the ground with their toes--some smoking, and inducing a fuddle by fuming the smoke through the nose--some sauntering in squads of two or more, about the grounds, with the arms in school-boy fashion, about each other's necks--some outside the enclosure, running between two long rows of Indian spectators for a prize--and others of the dignitaries, seated by themselves, talking over the affairs of the invincible Sioux nation. Inside the agency, four or five government officials with payrolls sat at a table and called the payees up one by one. As his name was called, each person or his sponsor stepped up, touched the secretary's pen, and reached for the money, which was usually deposited "by the hand of a white friend, in the box of his band." 54 These, then, were the Sioux in 1849, still clinging to what remained of their traditional way of life in the face of vast changes taking place about them and threatening soon to disrupt that way of life and shatter it beyond all hope of recovery. ____________________ 54 Minnesota Pioneer, September 27, 1849. -71- CHAPTER 4 The Monstrous Conspiracy FROM COLONIAL TIMES the pattern of Indian-white relationships in this country was characterized by a steady and increasing white pressure on the lands claimed by the Indians. The pressure became especially intense after the Revolution, when settlers poured across the Appalachians. Between 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville was forced on a dozen tribes after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and 1817 and 1818, when cessions having at least the coloration of Indian consent were made, the Indians ceded most of their lands in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. After Jackson's Indian removal bill in 1830, the small tracts reserved at the time of those treaties were also surrendered and the Indians obliged to emigrate across the Mississippi. 1 The Sioux were not subjected to this kind of pressure until comparatively late, the small cession made in 1830 having been of slight importance and that made in 1837 involving lands no longer extensively used by them. 2 Sooner or later, however, the advancing frontier was certain to reach the upper Mississippi valley. Oddly enough, the first major land cession negotiated with the Santee Sioux was not an attempt to open territory to white settlement but ____________________ 1 Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 18, 32-34, and passim. 2 One village, Kapozha, was located on the cast bank of the Mississippi and had to move across the river after the treaty of 1837. -72- rather part of an idealistic scheme to create a northern Indian territory to be occupied by the tribes expelled from the Old Northwest. The chief advocate of this scheme was Secretary of War John Bell, who, as chairman of the House Indian Affairs Committee, had studied the Indian problem and had become convinced that such a territory would offer the best solution to the problem created by the emigration of the eastern tribes. By a liberal construction of a provision in the Indian appropriations act passed March 3, 1841, Bell undertook to negotiate with the Sioux for the cession of a portion of their lands sufficient to accommodate the emigrating tribes. To conduct the negotiations he selected Governor Doty of Wisconsin Territory, who had accompanied Schoolcraft in 1820 and was somewhat familiar with the region desired and with its native inhabitants. 3 In company with several traders whose services he regarded as essential, Doty arrived at Traverse des Sioux about mid-summer and met with the chiefs and braves of the Sissetons, Wahpetons, and Wahpekutes. He seems to have encountered remarkably little opposition to his proposal. Either the Indians did not understand what they were agreeing to, or else the traders had done a good job of softening them up for the kill. As a result, Doty not only made the desired treaty but exceeded his instructions as to the area of the cession. Bell had expected to buy not more than five million acres, but Doty found it expedient to purchase six times this area, for which the government was to pay $1,300,000. 4 Doty's treaty is an interesting document, a strange mixture of the utopian and the practical. The tract ceded was a rough parallelogram, west of the territory claimed by the Mdewakantons and east of the crest of the Coteau des Prairies. Everything south of roughly the fortysixth parallel and north of the present Minnesota-Iowa line was to be incorporated into an Indian territory, within which the Indians were to be encouraged to become farmers and, eventually, citizens. Specific tracts on the left bank of the Minnesota River were set apart for the various bands of Sioux who were parties to the treaty. Each of them was to be provided with an agent, a school, a blacksmith, a gristmill and
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:25:24 GMT -5
____________________ 3 Alice Elizabeth Smith, James Duane Doty: Frontier Promoter ( Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1954), pp. 257-258; U. S. Statutes at Large, V, 419. 4 James D. Doty to Secretary of War John Bell, August 4, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR. The treaty of July 31, 1841, may be found in Thomas Hughes, Old Traverse des Sioux ( St. Peter: Herald Publishing Co., 1929), pp. 166-170. Three copies, in different hands, are to be found accompanying Doty's letter of transmittal ( August 4, 1841). The treaty in Hughes is based on these. -73- sawmill (where water power was available), and other appurtenances of civilization. The whole was to be under the supervision of a governor or superintendent whose headquarters were to be at the mouth of the Blue Earth River. One of the innovations of Doty's plan was that it provided for more direct control of the Indian trade by the government. The traders became, in effect, government appointees, and the governor had the power to fix prices and otherwise regulate trade. 5 The traders' services in making this treaty possible were recognized by a provision allowing up to $150,000 for the payment of claims against the Indians by them and by white settlers. Furthermore, Doty seems to have promised jobs to virtually every trader operating in the Sioux country. Nine of them were to be appointed traders at the various settlements, three more were to be appointed agents, another was to be superintendent of agriculture at Traverse des Sioux, and Henry H. Sibley was to be placed in charge of the whole enterprise. 6 Upon what authority Doty presumed to dispense promises of jobs so liberally is not clear, but he seems to have operated on the principle that the best way to solve the problem of the traders' influence over the Indians was to acknowledge it and accept it. The date of the principal treaty was July 31, 1841. On August 11, at Mendota, Doty negotiated a supplementary treaty with five of the seven Mdewakanton bands, by the terms of which they ceded all their lands and agreed to move to the left bank of the Minnesota. They agreed to the relevant clauses of the earlier treaty and to provisions substituted for the others. The cession was estimated at about two million acres. 7 The two lower bands (Red Wing and Wabasha) refused to sell. Agent Bruce recommended that, if they did not change their minds about selling, they should be removed to a point on the river "Embaratz" (the Zumbro) about thirty miles south of the Red Wing village; this would have been south and southwest of the present town of Pine Island, a favorite hunting ground of the Red Wing band. 8 ____________________ 5 Doty to Bell, August 9, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR. 6 Ibid. 7 Doty to Bell, August 14, 1841; and " Articles of a Treaty made and concluded at Mindota [sic] . . . between James Duane Doty . . . and the Minda Waukanto Bands of the Dakota Nation," ibid. 8 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Doc. I, p. 355. Doty fails to mention the refusal of these two bands to sell in his correspondence with the Secretary of War, and the treaty as found in RG 75 includes no signatures. Still a third treaty was made with the halfbreeds for the relinquishment for $200,000 of a reserve on Lake Pepin provided by the -74- Although the Indians neglected their hunting and farming in the expectation of receiving large annuities and were in "deplorable" condition by the fall of 1842, the Doty treaties were destined never to be ratified by the Senate and the grandiose plan for an Indian territory never to reach fruition. Besides opposition from former agent Taliaferro, who denounced it as a plot by the traders to gain complete control over the Indians, it ran into more formidable resistance from the Senate on quite other grounds, notably from the expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Cutting through the maze of stated legalistic objections, it is evident that Benton's real reason for opposing the treaty was that it would have locked up a valuable tract of country for the Indians instead of opening it to white settlement. The political motives that may have contributed to the defeat of the Doty treaties need not detain us here. Presented to the Senate at the very end of the session, the first treaty was tabled on September 13, 1841, resubmitted the next spring, and finally rejected on August 29, 1842. 9 The idea of a cession of the lands claimed by the Sioux in Minnesota was allowed to rest through most of the decade of the forties, and Indian Bureau officials behaved as though they expected the Sioux to stay where they were for all time. The proposal was revived, however, shortly after Minnesota became a territory in 1849. Almost as soon as he had taken office as governor, Alexander Ramsey began urging his superiors to capitalize on what he represented as the Indians' eagerness to sell their lands. His suggestion met a favorable reception from Indian Commissioner Orlando Brown and from Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, to whose charge Indian affairs had been transferred with the creation that year of the new Department of the Interior. In a twenty-one-page letter Brown set forth detailed instructions for ____________________ treaty of 1830 but never occupied. See Doty to Bell, September 19, 1841, and Doty to Secretary of War John C. Spencer, November 9, 1841, NARS, RG 75, LR. 9 Lawrence Taliaferro to Bell, September 10, 1841, and Thomas Hart Benton to the President [ John Tyler], September 14, 1841, ibid.; Smith, James Duane Doty, pp. 260262. Calling the treaty the "most unjustifiable and reprehensible thing of the kind that ever came before the Senate," Benton argued that, in proposing to set up a government for the Indian territory, it constituted an attempt by the executive branch to arrogate to itself functions properly the prerogative of the legislative branch. Some of the missionaries looked favorably on the Doty treaties. Stephen R. Riggs, who was with Doty at Traverse des Sioux, wrote Samuel W. Pond: "I am pleased at the Gov. views about civilizing them [the Indians]. They are comprehensive and enlightened. The experiment must show whether they are practicable under present circumstances." See Riggs to Pond, July 29, 1841, in Pond papers, Minnesota Historical Society. -75- negotiations to be held at the fall annuity payment. All lands claimed by the Sioux north of the Iowa line were to be acquired--more if possible; the region south of the Minnesota River should be the absolute minimum accepted. The price paid should be determined by the value of the land to the Indians (not much, thought Brown), not by its value to potential white immigrants. Two or two and a half cents per acre would surely be ample, although the commissioners were authorized to go above this if they thought the President and the Senate would agree. 10 The attempt to negotiate with the Sioux in the fall of 1849 was a dismal failure. Many of the western Indians had left on their annual buffalo hunt, and the Mdewakantons were unwilling to treat so late in the season "and for other reasons," as Ramsey cryptically expressed it. Their chief reason probably was that they did not wish to share their annuities under the 1837 treaty with the other bands, as Brown's instructions had specified. They evaded the proposal for a cession and spent their time complaining of various grievances, notably the disposition of the education fund. They demanded that their grievances be redressed before they would discuss any cessions, and they urged the other bands not to come to the negotiations. 11 This abortive attempt to make a treaty had one benefit: it taught Ramsey something about Indians. He undoubtedly learned a good deal also by talking to his friend Henry H. Sibley, who had traded with them for nearly fifteen years. In December, 1849, the two men addressed a letter to Commissioner Brown, in which they urged a more realistic approach to the matter of obtaining the desired cession. In the first place, the Indians would not sell unless they had the assurance that they would be permanently located on some portion of the proposed cession. Ramsey suggested that they be allowed to remain on the lands north of the Minnesota, above the Little Rapids, and that they be further permitted to hunt anywhere on the cession not occupied by whites until the President might direct otherwise. Furthermore, the Indians objected to a limited annuity on the grounds that its expiration would work a hardship on them. A better method, thought Ramsey and Sibley, was to give them a fixed sum for twenty years, then reduce it if their numbers had diminished, and continue the practice "until the ____________________ 10 Alexander Ramsey to William Medill, June 19, 1849; James Ewing to Orlando Brown, July 16, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency; Brown to Ramsey, July 14, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LS; Brown to Ramsey and Governor John Chambers, August 25, 1849, NARS, RG 75, LR. 11 Ramsey to Brown, September 18, October 4, and December 10, 1849; Chambers and Ramsey to Ewing, October 18, 1849, ibid. -76-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:26:26 GMT -5
bands should become extinct." Another difficulty was that the Doty treaties had made the Indians aware of the value placed on their lands by the whites. Hence there was no hope of buying the land for less than ten cents an acre. Buying twenty or twenty-five million acres at this price and deducting the traders' debts would leave a sum sufficient to give each Indian fifteen or sixteen dollars annually at an interest rate of five per cent. Liberality, the two men urged, was the true policy to follow. 12 After the failure of negotiations in 1849, it was assumed that another attempt would be made the following year. Although Ramsey was advised early in September, 1850, to hold his Indians in readiness for forty days after the passage of the Indian appropriations act, no further instructions came, and the only result was that the Indians missed out on their fall hunt. In 1851, however, the government at last meant business. To assist Ramsey in making the desired treaty, no less a personage than the new commissioner of Indian affairs, Luke Lea, was detached from his duties in Washington and sent to the remote upper Mississippi valley. The instructions the two men received from Secretary of Interior A. H. H. Stuart were similar to those sent to Ramsey two years earlier, with two important exceptions. They were permitted to pay up to ten cents an acre for the lands; and if they thought it proper for the Indians to be allowed to remain on some part of the cession "during the pleasure of the President," they were authorized to include such a provision in the treaty, provided the locations were as remote as possible from the nearest white settlements. 13 The earlier instructions had expressly forbidden such reservations. Many observers have noted the moral obliquity that seemingly afflicted white men in their dealings with Indians. Men justly respected for integrity and fairness in their relations with other white men saw nothing reprehensible about resorting to all manner of chicanery and equivocation when dealing with Indians. Starting from the axiom that the Indians were mere children and had a less enlightened view of what would serve their own best interests than the Great Father and his representatives did, government officials, especially treaty commissioners, felt themselves under no restraints in deceiving or bullying the Indians into acceptance of terms decided upon by higher authority. ____________________ 12 Ramsey and Henry H. Sibley to Brown, December 10, 1849, ibid. 13 Acting Commissioner A. L. Loughery to Ramsey, September 5, 1850, NARS, RG 75, LS; Ramsey to Commissioner Luke Lea, December 21, 1850; Secretary of Interior A. H. H. Stuart to Lea and Ramsey, May 16, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR; U.S. Statutes at Large, IX, 556. -77- They knew--or thought they knew--what was best for the Indians, and the end justified the means. By a remarkable coincidence, what was deemed best for the Indians was invariably also to the advantage of the government, the traders, and, above all, the land-hungry settlers. If one were seeking a treaty tailor-made to illustrate this phenomenon, he could not do better than to examine the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, negotiated with the Sioux in the summer of 1851. All the standard techniques were employed by the commissioners. The carrot and the stick--and at least once the mailed fist--were alternately displayed, as the occasion seemed to demand. If the Indians asked for time to consider the terms offered them, they were chided for behaving like women and children rather than men. If they asked shrewd, businesslike questions, the commissioners uttered cries of injured innocence: surely the Indians did not think the Great Father would deceive them! If they wanted certain provisions changed, they were told that it was too late; the treaty had already been written down. The Indians were flattered and brow-beaten by turns, wheedled and shamed, promised and threatened, praised for their wisdom and ridiculed for their folly. In such fashion was their " free consent" obtained. Like Doty in 1841, Ramsey and Lea determined to treat first with the less sophisticated upper Sioux--the non-annuity bands--so that if they signed a treaty, the commissioners could present the lower bands with a fait accompli that would virtually force the Mdewakantons to follow their example. The Wahpekutes were permitted, at their own request, to meet the commissioners in company with the Mdewakantons. When Ramsey and Lea arrived at Traverse des Sioux late in June, they found few Indians on hand but plenty of traders and other hangerson. Few treaties before or afterward were so thoroughly covered for the benefit of the general public. Two artists were present to memorialize the event on canvas, and the press was ably represented by editor Goodhue of the Pioneer, whose running journal furnishes the most detailed account of the proceedings. After three weeks of waiting around for the remote bands to appear, during which time the Indians present lived well on beef, pork, and bread, the negotiations finally got under way July 18 in an outdoor arbor on a terrace well back from the river. In all the speeches by the commissioners, stress was laid on the Indians' desire to sell their lands, a wish which the government was represented as being willing to humor. Having heard that the game had nearly all disappeared "and that hunger and starvation, like wolves, were often in their lodges," the -78- President had decided to send the commissioner himself in order to guarantee that the Indians' wishes would be met. Naturally, he denied that the government had any desire to take advantage of them in any way. Since the Indians had much land, which they were unable to use, and the Great Father had money and goods, an exchange seemed perfectly logical. Lea pointed out that other tribes had sold their lands and were now "happier and more comfortable, and every year growing better and richer." His hearers had no way of verifying this assertion, but the modern reader, who can consult Grant Foreman The Last Trek of the Indians for the details of the misery and starvation among the eastern Indians forced to emigrate, is in a better position to judge its accuracy. 14 After Lea had outlined the benefits to be received under the terms of the proposed treaty, he invited comments from the Indians. This proved a tactical error in that it led to an incipient mutiny which had to be quelled by a threat of stopping the issue of rations. The commissioners did, however, honor the reasonable request that the treaty provisions as outlined by Lea be put in writing so that the Indians could consider them at length, and several amendments proposed by the Indians after a day's deliberation were incorporated into the final document. 15 On July 23 the commissioners ordered blankets, knives, tobacco, ribbons, paint, and other articles piled up in tempting array, just in case there should be any inclination on the part of the Indians to back out at this late hour. At 1:40 that afternoon the commissioners took their places and were followed shortly by the Indians. The pipe passed among the parties to the negotiation, and then the treaty was read in English and translated into Dakota by Stephen R. Riggs. Soon the signing by the Indians began. Sleepy Eyes threatened to disrupt the harmony of the ceremony by some largely irrelevant objections, and another Sisseton requested that the treaty not be changed in Washington. Upon Lea's assurance that "everything we promise will be faithfully performed," the signing went forward. The Indian who had earlier asked that the treaty be written down now took occasion to point out to the ____________________ 14 William G. Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852 ( St. Paul: W. G. Le Duc, 1852), pp. 31, 37-38, 52-54. This is a reprint of a day-by-day account of the treaty negotiations, published in the Minnesota Pioneer from July 3 through August 14, 1851. Folwell attributes the authorship to James M. Goodhue, editor of the Pioneer. See also Lucile M. Kane , "The Sioux Treaties and the Traders," Minnesota History, XXXII ( June 1951), 65-80. 15 Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852, pp. 55-60. -79- white men that "you think it a great deal of money to give for this land, but you must well understand that the money will all go back to the whites again, and the country will also remain theirs." When the treaty had been signed by everyone concerned, Lea asked the Indians "to be as honest and faithful in its observance as the government will be upon their part." As matters turned out, meeting this obligation would not have demanded any great degree of honesty or faithfulness. The ceremony completed, Goodhue commented: "Thus ended the sale of twenty one millions of acres of the finest land in the world." 16 The treaty of Traverse des Sioux provided for the cession by the upper Sioux of all their claims in what is today Minnesota and a small portion of South Dakota. For this cession they were to receive $1,665,000, divided as follows: $275,000 was to go to the chiefs to enable them to "settle their affairs" (i.e., pay their debts to the traders), pay the costs of removal, and subsist themselves and their people for one year; $30,000 was to be spent to establish schools, blacksmith shops, and mills, and to open farms on the new reservation. The remainder of the principal ($1,360,000) was to bear interest at a rate of five per cent for a period of fifty years. This interest was to be used for the benefit of the Indians, who would receive a $40,000 cash annuity and $10,000 worth of goods and provisions annually; $12,000 was to be spent for general agricultural and civilization purposes, and $6,000 was to be used for education. An important article, later stricken out by the Senate, provided for a reservation on the upper Minnesota, extending for ten miles on either side of the river and from the western end of the cession down to the Yellow Medicine River. 17 Although treaty stipulations providing for direct payments for traders' debts had been outlawed by Congress, a way was found to evade the letter of the law at Traverse des Sioux. Each Indian, as he stepped away from the treaty table, was pulled to a barrel nearby and made to sign a document prepared by the traders. By its terms the signatories to the treaty acknowledged their debts to the traders and half-breeds and pledged themselves, as the representatives of their respective bands, to pay those obligations. No schedule of the sums owed was attached to the document, but after the ceremony was over the traders got together and scaled down their claims (originally estimated at $431,735.78) to the round sum of $210,000; the half-breeds were to get $40,000. The ____________________ 16 Ibid., pp. 64-468. 17 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 588-589. -80- Indians later claimed that they had thought they were signing a third copy of the treaty, as did Thomas S. Williamson. The traders and some others insisted, however, that the whole matter had been discussed privately beforehand and that the Indians knew perfectly well what they were signing. The testimony later taken is voluminous and contradictory, but one thing is certain: the "traders' paper" and the manner in which the Indians were induced to sign it did more than any other single action on the part of the white men present at the treaty to engender bitterness among the Indians afterward. 18 A few days after the signing of the treaty of Traverse des Sioux with the upper bands, a similar agreement was made at Mendota with the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes. Because the first treaty was the more spectacular and because it made the second almost inevitable and a trifle anticlimactic, historians have tended to give it their almost exclusive attention and to dismiss the treaty of Mendota with a few words. This approach calls for correction, for the second treaty is more important than its surface appearance may suggest. It was at Mendota, among Indians who had made treaties before, that the commissioners were really put on their mettle and where the treaty-making techniques were most baldly displayed in all their ruthlessness. It was here that the hard questions were asked--and answered with equivocation and bullying. "Once more unto the beef, dear friends, once more," wrote Goodhue as the council got under way in the upper room of a large warehouse. Ramsey opened the negotiations on the afternoon of July 29 with much the same speech he had delivered eleven days earlier, but with the additional remark that, since the upper Sioux had already sold their lands, there was really nothing for the lower bands to do but follow suit. Because these people, unlike most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons, would have to leave their homes, Lea made perfunctory obeisance to the natural love of one's homeland and added that he himself had moved several times. When the treaty terms had been outlined and a tract on the upper Minnesota below that reserved for the upper bands had been suggested as a reservation, he commented that there probably would be no remarks but that if there were he would entertain them. Wabasha injected a sour note into the council at once by asking that the Mdewakantons be paid the education fund that had so long been a source of ill feeling with them. And a Wahpekute warrior asked about ____________________ 18 William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, I ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1956), 282-283. -81- the government's announced plans to pay his band for the killing of seventeen of their men by the Sacs and Foxes two years earlier. The commissioners parried both of these inquiries and then adjourned the council. 19 When they met again the next day, it was, at Wabasha's request, outdoors, on a high plain near Pilot Knob, overlooking the landing at Mendota and within sight of Fort Snelling. The chiefs, harder bargainers than their Sisseton and Wahpeton counterparts, refused to commit themselves on the proposed treaty, and the council had to be adjourned again without action. When it reconvened on July 31, Little Crow brought the discussion back to the question of the unpaid annuities. Lea tried to evade the issue, but Ramsey gave as straightforward an answer as any the Indians were likely to get: "If this treaty can be arranged, so that we can be justified in paying you this money," he said, "as much of it will be paid down to you as will be equal to your usual cash annuities for three years." The chiefs seemed to assent, and Ramsey thought that work on the treaty might as well go ahead. Little Crow was not ready yet, however; "We will talk of nothing else but that money, if it is until next spring," he said. Ramsey's reply that the money would be paid when the treaty was finished seemed not to satisfy the Indians, for they remained silent when Lea tried to return to the discussion of the treaty. Trying a different tack, the commissioners abruptly terminated the session and left. 20 The next day the Indians assembled and asked the commissioners to join them, but the discussions that followed were fruitless. Evidently a break was in order, to give everyone time to think matters over and come back with something concrete. So, despite the long wait at Traverse des Sioux, the commissioners allowed three days to pass without any formal negotiations. Then, on August 5, the council reassembled for what proved to be the decisive session. After the treaty had been read in English and translated by Gideon Pond, Little Crow was invited to sign. He made no move to do so. Then Wabasha arose and questioned the whole argument that the treaty would be for the Indians' benefit; the provisions in the earlier treaty for schools, farmers, etc., had been of no benefit to them, and he thought a straight cash payment would be preferable. Furthermore, he objected to the prairie country which had been selected as their future home; he had always lived near the woods and preferred that type of country. At this point Lea bared the mailed fist that always lay thinly concealed behind his ____________________
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:27:08 GMT -5
19 Le Duc, Minnesota Year Book for 1852, pp. 70-75. 20 Ibid., pp. 75-78. -82- words. Addressing Wabasha and the other chiefs, he said: "Suppose your Great Father wanted your lands and did not want a treaty for your good, he could come with 100,000 men and drive you off to the Rocky Mountains." The matter had been thoroughly thought over, a treaty had been prepared and signed by the commissioners, and it was too late to talk of changing it. But even this bald threat did not produce the desired result, for when Ramsey again called for signers, no one offered to be the first. 21 Objections continued to be voiced. After the commissioners had evaded some and made slight concessions in response to others, Wacouta spoke up to express a well-founded fear: Would the treaty be changed when it got to Washington? "If all prove true as you say, it will be very good indeed. But," he continued, "when we were at Washington [in 1837], the chiefs were told many things; which when we came back here, and attempted to carry out, we found could not be done. At the end of three or four years, the Indians found out very different from what they had been told, and all were ashamed." He also asked for a reservation south of his village, "a tract of land called Pine Island, which is a good place for Indians." The high regard in which Wacouta was held inhibited Ramsey from ridiculing him as he had the earlier chiefs, but he pointed out that it would be impossible to satisfy everyone with a single treaty. As a partial concession, he promised that the Indians could go on hunting in their old homes for many years, until the country filled up with settlers. 22 Still the objections went on, Wabasha and Little Crow leading the attack. Ramsey seemed hurt by the implications of some of the Indians' remarks. The chiefs made the commissioners ashamed, he said: "They seem to think we have come here as the representatives of the Great Father to cheat them." The carrot having been ineffectual, the stick was now brought into play once more, as Lea obliquely threatened to cut off rations, saying, "No man puts any food in his mouth by long talk; but may often get hungry at it. Let the Little Crow and the chiefs step forward and sign." This peremptory demand had the desired effect, for Little Crow stepped up and wrote his name, Taoyateduta, and the other chiefs made their X's, until all sixty-four had signed.23 On that hill overlooking the meeting point of the two rivers, the lower Sioux had signed away their patrimony. The treaty of Mendota contained essentially the same terms as the ____________________ 21 Ibid., pp. 79-82. 22 Ibid., pp. 82-85. 23 Ibid., pp. 85-86. -83- earlier one, with the exception of a smaller payment ($1,410,000), a provision that in the future the entire annuity under the 1837 treaty would be paid in cash, and different specifications for the reservation. The article concerning the reservation, like that in the other treaty, was stricken out by the Senate. In order to gain the assent of the Wahpekutes, a clause was included providing for their participation in benefits derived from the 1837 treaty. Like the treaty of Traverse des Sioux, this agreement provided that the principal sum, on which interest was to be paid for fifty years, should not revert to the Indians upon the expiration of that time. 24 As soon as the treaties had been signed, whites began pouring onto the ceded lands. Within two weeks of the end of negotiations at Mendota, they were reported to be crossing the Mississippi"in troops," making claims, and building shanties on lands which they as yet had no legal right to intrude upon. Most were said to be speculators rather than prospective settlers. Agent McLean protested to his superiors, but he recognized that it would be useless to appeal to the local civil authorities for redress, since they were in sympathy with the intruders. He applied to the commandant at Fort Snelling but was told that the garrison could do nothing about the situation. 25 Expecting the treaties to be ratified shortly, Ramsey was disposed to allow this invasion to take place, having heard, he said, that the government had elsewhere adopted the practice of tacitly indulging "her citizens in entering upon Indian lands, in the period between a treaty, and its ratification by the Senate." His only fear was that there might be a clash between the intruders and the Indians, but thus far the latter had shown remarkable forbearance. Their patience was sorely tried, however, when settlers began laying out farms on the Indians' fields and hay ground and ordering the Indians off. 26 In one sense the presence of these hordes of white settlers was fortunate for the Indians during the winter of 1851-1852. Having missed out on their summer hunt and having lost most of their corn to floods, living in momentary expectation of receiving payments under the new treaties, the Indians were destitute and in a starving condition much of the winter and spring. The settlers, motivated no doubt by considera- ____________________ 24 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 591-593. 25 Nathaniel McLean to Lea, August 19, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR. 26 Ramsey to Lea, January 28, 1852, ibid.; 32nd Cong., 2nd Sess., Ex. Doc. 1, p. 354. This last imposition was inflicted between the time of the ratification of the treaties and their proclamation by the President. -84- tions of safety, since many of the Indians were armed, contributed heavily to their support and, in the opinion of contemporary observers, saved them from mass starvation. 27 The only solution, as the whites saw it, was the swift ratification of the treaties. Goodhue warned that unless the treaties were ratified, the Indians would lose their lands without compensation, and there would be an Indian war. As a matter of fact, the treaties did not even reach the Senate until February 13--more than six months after they had been concluded--and then no sense of urgency animated the men whose task it was to ratify them. Despite opposition from southern senators who had no wish to see another northern state enter the Union in a few years, the treaties were finally ratified, with bare two-thirds majorities, on June 23, 1852, with amendments striking out the provisions for reservations and thus leaving the Indians without a home. 28 In the general rejoicing over the passage of the treaties, the white people of Minnesota seemed to regard the amendments as of little moment. The Pioneer commented that the Indians were losing nothing "of any positive value to them." Many probably assumed that the assent of the Indians to the changes would not be necessary, but Congress included in the Indian appropriations bill, passed August 30, a proviso that none of the $690,050 appropriated to carry out the treaty terms could be expended until the Indians had agreed to the amendments. 29 This proviso looks suspiciously like a last-ditch effort to defeat the treaties, but it could also be interpreted as an honest attempt to deal justly with the Indians. Obtaining their consent proved by no means easy. When Ramsey met with the chiefs late in August and explained the amendments to them, they refused peremptorily to give their assent unless they could be assured of the location of their future reservation. He was extricated from the awkward position in which he found himself by virtue of a vaguely ____________________ 27 McLean to Lea, August 19, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR; Minnesota Pioneer, August 14, 1851, March 4 and April 1, 1852. Only the Mdewakantons had received any annuities the previous summer, and the $30,000 turned over to them after the treaty at Mendota was spent almost at once. By the spring of 1852 the Indians were said to have eaten their ponies, "and when that was all gone, [had] literally gnawed the bark off of the trees." 28 Minnesota Pioneer, April 1, May 6, and July 1, 1852; Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 290-291; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 593. In theory they had a home outside the limits of the cession, but no such location had been chosen, and they had been led to expect a reservation within the cession. 29 Minnesota Pioneer, July 15, 1852; U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 52. -85- worded letter to Lea from the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, who said that the amendments authorized the President to allow the Indians to remain on a portion of their lands until the whites wanted it. With this slender assurance, Ramsey gave the chiefs a halfpromise which was probably converted into a guarantee in the process of translation, and they finally consented to the amendments. 30 One further hurdle remained to be surmounted: the traders and half-breeds had to be paid off. Theoretically, Ramsey could simply have paid them the sums specified in the traders' paper out of the $690,050 he was authorized to disburse. He believed, however, that legal evidence in the form of witnessed receipts signed by the chiefs and headmen was called for. Early in November he undertook this delicate task. Since the Wahpekutes had signed a traders' paper at Mendota and had not repudiated it, they presented no problem. The Mdewakantons were not so docile. Once more the carrot and the stick had to be used. The stick in this case was a delay in the payment of the annuities due under the 1837 treaty, as well as of the current annuity--a highly effective weapon with Indians who had been hovering on the brink of starvation much of the previous year. The carrot consisted of dividing a sum of $20,000 equally among the seven chiefs, ostensibly to be paid to certain half-breeds who had not benefited from the treaty. There was a fine cloak-and-dagger scene late on the night of November 8, when Wabasha and Wacouta were presented with bags of gold and promptly signed a receipt for the entire $90,000 supposedly due the traders and a statement authorizing Ramsey to pay the remaining $70,000. The other chiefs followed their example the next day, and on the eleventh each signed a voucher for $2,857.14 2/7. 31 The upper Sioux, who had protested as soon as they learned the nature of the traders' paper they had signed, also proved refractory and had to be reduced to submission by the withholding of their annuities and by the arrest and deposition from his chieftainship of Red Iron, leader of the opposition. It was almost the end of November before Ramsey finally secured the signatures of eleven chiefs and braves of sufficient stature to give the operation the appearance of legality. 32 ____________________ 30 Ramsey to Lea, August 28, September 4 and 10, 1852; Senator D. R. Atchison to Lea, August 3, 1852, NARS, RG 75, LR; Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 294. The Wahpekutes also objected to the striking out of the clause that would have provided for their participation in the annuities received by the Mdewakantons under the treaty of 1837. 31 Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 284, 297-299. 32 Ibid., I, 299-303. In reply to the complaint about the traders' paper, Ramsey had assured the upper Sioux in December, 1851, that, as the paper was not part of the -86- Newton H. Winchell, though no admirer of the Sioux, referred to the treaties of 1851 as a "monstrous conspiracy." 33 They were that and more. From beginning to end--the tactics used to get the Indians to agree to the treaties in the first place, the bad faith of the Senate in amending them, the devices employed to force the Indians to accept the amendments, the whole nefarious business of the traders' paper-it was a thoroughly sordid affair, equal in infamy to anything else in the long history of injustice perpetrated upon the Indians by the authorized representatives of the United States government in the name of that government. Despite all the fine talk during the negotiations about the welfare of the Indians, they seem to have been speedily lost sight of once their X's were down on paper. When the treaties reached the Senate, the Indians became mere pawns in a power struggle between sectional and political factions. Even the subsequent investigation of Ramsey's role in the affair--in which he was whitewashed by the Senate--seems to have been politically motivated and not the product of any real concern for the Indians. 34 When the whirlwind was reaped a decade later, the immediate victims were the comparatively innocent white settlers near the reservation, not the men ultimately responsible. In the end, of course, the ones who suffered most were, as always, the Indians. ____________________ treaty, the commisioners had no power, "and assumed none, in relation to the payment of debts to their traders." See McLean to Lea, December 13, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR. His statement, which the Indians apparently accepted at face value, showed either ignorance of the terms of the paper (as he later testified) or disingenuousness. For a discussion of the role played by one Madison Sweetser in this affair, see Folwell, History of Minnesota, I, 299-303. 33 Newton H. Winchell, The Aborigines of Minnesota ( St. Paul: The Pioneer Co., 1911), p. 554. 34 Folwell (in History of Minnesota, I, 462-470) traces the course of the investigation in some detail. His information is derived principally from the voluminous "Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the President of the United States to Investigate the Official Conduct of Alexander H. Ramsey, Late Governor of Minnesota, with the Testimony Taken in the Case by Them, Transmitted to the Senate with the Message of the President of the United States, January 10, 1854," 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 61. -87-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:28:14 GMT -5
CHAPTER 5 Reservation Days THE TREATIES of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota brought the Santee Sioux within the toils of the reservation system for the first time. They had previously been able to live and hunt pretty much as they pleased in the region they had occupied since their expulsion from the Mille Lacs country. But now, by submitting to the terms of these treaties, they became reservation Indians, subject to the humiliation and demoralization that condition implied in the nineteenth century. The practical impossibility of immediately confining them to the reservation prolonged their freedom for a few years; but as their old lands filled with white settlers and as strenuous efforts were made to keep them on the reservation, they gradually submitted to the dictates of authority. Properly speaking, the Santees had no reservation under the terms of the 1851 treaties as amended by the Senate. But since the directive to locate them on some tract of land outside the ceded area was never acted upon, they were temporarily assigned to the reservation originally set apart by those treaties. The failure of the government to make any specific provision for them before their removal from their old homes is attributable in part to the confusion attending the changeover from a Whig to a Democratic administration in the spring of 1853 and the preoccupation of the new officials with other concerns. After a few months, however, the question began to be raised as to the exact status of the land assigned to the Indians. People charged with managing their -88- affairs wondered about the anomaly of locating them on lands they had sold and from the sale of which they were already receiving payment. Early in 1854 the Secretary of the Interior submitted to President Pierce his recommendation that the Indians be permitted to occupy the reservation as their permanent home "until the President shall consider it proper to remove them." 1 Pierce gave his approval to this oddly phrased recommendation, and there the matter rested. Some members of Congress must have recognized the paradox of a permanent home from which the residents might at any time be evicted, for the Indian appropriations act of July 31, 1854, contained a provision that "the President be authorized to confirm to the Sioux of Minnesota, forever, the reserve on the Minnesota River" then occupied by them, "upon such conditions as he may deem just." 2 No executive action was ever taken in line with this authorization, however, and the status of the lands occupied by the Indians remained uncertain until 1860, when, as will be seen, the Senate belatedly confirmed the Indian title to them. 3 Although the treaties had been negotiated by the Whig governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey, neither he nor the Whig appointee to the post of agent, Nathaniel McLean, had any part in the actual removal of the Indians to their new reservation. The treaties were not formally proclaimed until February 24, 1853; and before anything could be accomplished toward removing the Indians and establishing the agency, both men were out of office, together with the Indian commissioner, Luke Lea. Although the new Democratic governor, Willis A. Gorman, had no special qualifications for the job of superintendent of Indian affairs, the agent who replaced McLean, Robert G. Murphy, was better qualified, having held the post briefly in 1848-1849. And the new commissioner, George Manypenny, though sometimes wrongheaded, was an able man who took his responsibilities more seriously than did most holders of the office in the nineteenth century. Overruling McLean's earlier plan, Murphy decided to locate the new agency at a fairly well timbered site on the south side of the Minnesota River, about fifteen miles above Fort Ridgely, a military post ____________________ 1 Governor Willis A. Gorman to Commissioner George Manypenny, September 13, 1853; Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland to Manypenny, April 13, 1854, NARS, RG 75, LR. 2 U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 326, 331. 3 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 780-789. -89- then being built. His ambitious plans for breaking land, erecting buildings to house the blacksmiths, farmers, and laborers, and cutting logs for the next season's construction made little progress in 1853, chiefly because he and Gorman had their hands full getting the Indians moved. The superintendent held several councils in the spring, at which the Indians pointed out that, since preparations for their reception on the reservation were incomplete, they would be much better off continuing to plant at their old homes until enough ground had been broken on the reservation for their needs. Gorman, who seems to have regarded their removal as a test of his competence as an administrator, argued with them until they finally agreed to visit the reservation and decide then whether preparations had progressed far enough to warrant their removal that summer. 4 This concession served as an entering wedge to induce a majority of the lower Indians to move that season. The emigration began in August and progressed slowly. By September 10, Gorman had got the two lower bands, who were the most strongly opposed to moving, as far as Little Crow's village, where they rested for a few days. While there the chiefs demanded in council that they be paid the funds accumulated under the 1837 treaty. Gorman offered to disburse $4,000 of the money in a per capita payment when they reached Shakopee's village. He actually paid out only $1,500, and that was taken from the subsistence and removal fund, but it was enough to pry them loose at Shakopee late in October and get them the rest of the way to the new agency. 5 Whatever his methods, Gorman was quite proud of his achievement in removing the Indians. Except for sixty members of Wabasha's band, who had fled to the Red Cedar River, all the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes had been safely brought to the reservation, he boasted, together with those Sissetons and Wahpetons who had resided on the lower Minnesota. 6 Most of them stayed only long enough to receive their annuities, however, and then took flight back to their old hunting grounds, where they spent the winter and, in some cases, the next summer as well. Conflicting accounts make it difficult to determine just what was accomplished in the first year on the reservation. Gorman's official reports ____________________ 4 Alexander Ramsey to Luke Lea, February 14, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, July 27, 1853; Robert G. Murphy to Gorman, September 3, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, May 27, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR; Minnesota Pioneer ( St. Paul), June 9, 1853. 5 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 314 ; Gorman to Manypenny, August 23 and 31, September 9, November 15 and 28, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR. 6 Gorman to Manypenny, November 15, 1853, ibid. -90- speak glowingly of extensive farming operations on the reservation. "It only requires a little energy to make the most wonderful progress in civilization among the Sioux," he complacently wrote in July, 1854. On the other hand, Moses N. Adams, a missionary at Traverse des Sioux, gave the impression that very little was done to establish the Indians as farmers. His version received partial confirmation from Superintendent of Farming Philander Prescott, who admitted that the Wahpekutes and three of the Mdewakanton bands were roving about the country most of that year, complaining of their treatment. It appears that only a small amount of land had been broken in 1853, and that so badly that it had to be plowed again before it could be planted. 7 The unwillingness of the Indians to settle down on the reservation had been predicted by one who knew them well, Lawrence Taliaferro, who in 1853 had written to Commissioner Manypenny that they had been so deceived by the outgoing administration as to be skeptical of all the government's professed efforts in their behalf. "Never--never deceive an Indian once even," he warned; "if you do, you may expect never to hear the last of your promise." 8 There were also other, more immediate reasons why the Indians refused to stay put on their reservation. The fact is that there was practically nothing to keep them there. Even Agent Murphy himself did not see fit to reside at the agency, but bought a house at Shakopee, where he remained for the rest of his term. He defended his residence there on the ground that, since the Indians spent most of their time off the reserve, he was actually in a better location to attend their wants than he would have been at the agency. Furthermore, since their old traders were still located at such places as Wabasha, Red Wing, and Faribault, the Indians found it cheaper to buy there and transport the goods and provisions to the reservation themselves than to have the traders sell at a higher rate at the agency. ____________________ 7 Gorman to Manypenny, July 18, 1854; Moses N. Adams to Manypenny, August 3, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, November 4, 1855, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1854, p. 74. Adams charged that no special effort was made to have the Indians return to the reservation early in the spring of 1854 and that neither Gorman nor Murphy was around at the time they should have begun planting. 8 Lawrence Taliaferro to Manypenny, July 12, 1853, NARS, RG 75, LR. Taliaferro continued to make gratuitous offers of advice and services for years after he had resigned his post as agent. In this letter he describes his achievements with the Indians --"deals a little in self-glorification," as the Indian Office clerk noted by way of summarizing the contents of the letter on the back--and announces that if the Indians should prove too refractory for the department, "temporarily I am at the service of my Country." -91- In any case, the roads from the settled parts of Minnesota to the reservation were so primitive that supplies could not be brought there in the winter. 9 The Indians did not leave the reservation in the expectation of enjoying an easy life among the white settlers; they were driven by starvation. The annuities were paid so late and in such small amounts in both 1853 and 1854 that the Indians could not live through the winter on what they received; and since there was little game on the reservation, they had no choice but to hunt in the ceded territory. So long as they merely hunted and fished in the woods, they encountered no hostility from the settlers, but those who sought to return to villages that were now becoming towns met with opposition. In the spring of 1854, before the Wacouta band returned from their winter hunt, their bark houses were burned by the white residents of the growing town of Red Wing. The Indians made no hostile overtures when they arrived, but simply located elsewhere and planted their corn as usual. 10 They continued, however, to visit the Red Wing area during the entire reservation period, to the increasing annoyance of the white settlers. The plowing done in 1854 was not impressive, in either quantity or quality, but some progress was made toward establishing an agency by the construction of eleven buildings, including two storehouses, a blacksmith shop, houses for the farmers and laborers, and boarding and work houses. There were still no houses for the agent, the interpreter, the head farmer, or the chiefs, however, and the single blacksmith was greatly overworked. In the next year twelve log houses were built for the employees and chiefs, a saw mill was raised and placed in readiness, and the frame was erected for a flour mill. More acreage was plowed for each band and for a few families who wished to farm individually. As a matter of fact, by September, 1855, the amount of land broken exceeded the immediate demands of the Indians, and some of it remained unplanted. 11 ____________________ 10 Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855, NARS, RG 75, LR. History of Goodhue County ( Red Wing: Wood, Alley & Co., 1878), p. 338. This information is contained in an address delivered June 15, 1869, by Dr. W. W. Sweeney, who settled at Red Wing in 1852. 11 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1854, pp. 74-75; 34th Cong., 1st and 2nd Sess., S. Doc. 1, pp. 378-380, 384-385. 9 Gorman to Manypenny, January 9, 1854 (incorrectly dated 1853); Murphy to Gorman, January 6, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, October 31, 1855; James Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855 (postmarked September 14), ibid.; Minnesota Pioneer, January 5, 1854. Shields, then a member of Congress, owned land near Faribault and took an interest in the welfare of the Indians who drifted into his locality. -92- Many of the Indians, especially the upper bands, for whom no plowing had been done, were still off the reservation in 1855, either farming at unauthorized locations or simply roaming around the settlements. Nearly all were dependent on hunting during the winter. They felt, with reason, that the representatives of the government were being grossly unfair in demanding that they stay on the reservation and yet not providing enough food for them to live on there. Possibly if they had made maximum use of the land broken for them, they might have produced enough food to sustain them through the winter, but it is doubtful. 12 The Indians had other complaints as well. From the very beginning, there had been hitches of one sort or another in getting their supplies to them. Ramsey had used so much of the subsistence and removal fund in persuading the Indians to accept the Senate's amendments to the treaties that he had little to turn over to his successor in the spring of 1853. In addition, goods sent up in the fall of 1852 had been detained at La Crosse by the closing of navigation on the Mississippi and did not reach the agent until the next spring. 13 In the summer of 1853 the upper bands neglected their customary summer hunt on the prairies in the expectation of receiving their annuities about July 1, but these were not sent from Washington until October and not distributed until late in November. The next year such annuities as did arrive, late in the fall, were so niggardly that the Indians at first refused to accept the money, saying it was not the amount the government promised them and accusing Murphy of holding back part of what was coming to them. 14 They may have been in error as to the amount of money they were entitled to, but if so they were to be pardoned. The officials responsible for keeping the accounts in order confessed themselves unclear about the amounts owed under the various treaties. The frequent changes of personnel of course contributed to the confusion. Murphy tried to untangle the complications involved in the education fund that had so long been accumulating; but he had only the figures of his predecessors to go by, and his pathetic appeal to the commissioner for specific instructions brought no immediate response. The Indians understood ____________________ 12 Murphy to Manypenny, May 25, 1855; Major H. Day to Manypenny, October 13, 1855, NARS, RG 75, LR. Day, then commanding officer at Fort Ridgely, was acting agent in Murphy's absence. 13 Ramsey to Manypenny, April 16, 1853; Gorman to Manypenny, September 8, 1853, ibid. 14 Minnesota Pioneer, October 20 and 27, 1853; Murphy to Manypenny, July 20, 1855; Murphy to Gorman, July 27, 1854; Murphy to Manypenny, December 30, 1854, NARS, RG 75, LR. -93- that Lea had told them in 1851 that the $30,000 paid upon the signing of the treaty of Mendota was about half the accumulated sum, and they kept asking for the other half. Gorman and Little Crow went to Washington in the spring of 1855 and were promised (so the chief thought, at least) that this sum would be paid. As the time approached when some of the provisions of the 1837 treaty would expire, Commissioner Manypenny got to work on the problem and finally submitted to the Secretary of the Interior a seventeen-page letter detailing the various appropriations made and the uses to which they had been put since 1838. The mouse which this mountain of labor brought forth was the conclusion that the government owed the Indians $30,041.58, which sum he recommended Congress be asked to appropriate, provided the Treasury Department concurred. 15 There the matter rested for a time. The withholding of the education fund was not the only respect in which the government failed to meet its obligations to the Sioux. For reasons not clear, appropriations during the early 1850's were insufficient to fulfill the provisions of the 1851 treaties. Not only did the Indians receive less money, goods, and provisions than they had a right to expect, but funds for the management of the agency were not forthcoming. The employees' wages were months, even years, in arrears, and improvements promised to the Indians languished in the planning stage or half completed for lack of funds. Furthermore, the physical problem of transporting supplies to the comparatively remote Sioux agency sometimes exceeded the powers of human ingenuity to solve. The Minnesota River could never be relied upon to be navigable at the season when goods and provisions reached St. Paul, and sometimes contractors had to default on their agreements. Add to this the inflationary effect of a rise in prices, which in 1855 resulted in the Indians' receiving only two thirds as much goods as they were accustomed to getting, and you have a situation extremely unpleasant for the Sioux and decidedly uncomfortable for Agent Murphy, whom they held immediately responsible for any shortages in their annuities. 16 The truth is that, even allowing for all the handicaps he labored under, Murphy does not seem to have exerted himself in behalf of the ____________________ 15 Murphy to Manypenny, September 28, 1855; Manypenny to McClelland, April 8, 1856, ibid. Congress did appropriate the sum of $42,841.47, which included the accumulated education fund, and $31,000 of it was paid in December of 1857. See William J. Cullen to Charles E. Mix, November 26 and December 24, 1857, ibid. 16 Gorman to Manypenny, July 18, 1854, and August 30, 1855; Murphy to Manypenny, November 4, 1855, ibid. -94- Indians to the degree that a truly dedicated agent like Taliaferro would have. Even the missionaries, Riggs and Williamson, though not wishing to see him replaced by someone worse, had to qualify their testimonial in his favor with the remarks that "he may have given more attention to his own pecuniary interests than we suppose is compatible with the full discharge of the duties of a public officer"; and the best they could say for him was that he was as good as anyone else the Indians had had as agent for the previous sixteen years. 17 Like all his predecessors, Murphy came under attack from the traders, both licensed and unlicensed, who repeatedly tried to have him removed. Their grudge against him seems to have stemmed mainly from his refusal to license those living off the reservation and his later exclusion of all traders from the annuity payments. Although their complaints did not directly produce the desired effect, they may have undermined his position and thus prepared the way for his eventual dismissal. 18 The axe fell on Murphy's neck when the Minnesota Superintendency was abolished in 1856 and Indian affairs in the territory were placed under the jurisdiction of the Northern Superintendency, then in the charge of Francis Huebschmann. When the superintendent visited the agency in June, his Teutonic sense of order was offended by the easygoing way in which affairs there had been managed by Murphy and Gorman. He found conditions on the reservation "deplorable" and a "spirit of lassitude" prevailing. 19 Within a few weeks Murphy had been replaced by Charles E. Flandrau, a man of considerable experience as an Indian trader and apparently also a man of integrity. Under Flandrau things began to hum around the agency, though the results of his more vigorous administration did not become evident until after he had left office. He inherited an unfortunate state of affairs and was confronted with some new and extremely serious problems before he could feel his way into the job. Then, in the summer of 1857, he was named to the territorial supreme court and also served as a member of the convention to draw up a constitution for the proposed state of Minnesota. ____________________ 17 Memorandum from Stephen R. Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson to Manypenny, March 17, 1855, ibid. The reference to "sixteen years" is interesting, as that was the length of time since Taliaferro had resigned. 18 Murphy to Shields, January 28 and March 4, 1855; Murphy to Manypenny, March 21, 1855; Murphy to J. Ross Brown, March 24, 1855; Shields to Manypenny, n.d., 1855; Affidavit of James Wells, March 6, 1855, ibid. 19 McClelland to Manypenny, January 23, 1856, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency; Francis Huebschmann to Manypenny, July 19 and June 28, 1856, NARS, RG 75, LR. If conditions on the reservation were as bad as Huebschmann describes them, he had reason for dismissing Murphy. -95-
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These responsibilities kept him away from the agency much of the time, and finally he resigned his position after only thirteen months as agent for the Sioux. While the government was gradually establishing a presence on the reservation, the missionaries were also turning their eyes in that direction. Except for Lac qui Parle, all the missions among the Santee Sioux were located on the ceded lands and hence were left, officially at least, without any Indians to minister to after the removal in 1853. Most of the missionaries remained where they were and continued their work among the white settlers, but Williamson elected to stay with the Indians. After nearly four years at Little Crow's village, he moved in the fall of 1852 to a point a few miles above the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River and there, among the upper Sioux, established a new mission called Pajutazee. In the late winter of 1854 the Lac qui Parle mission burned to the ground, and Riggs moved his mission down the Minnesota to a site not far from Williamson's and started a new station called Hazelwood. 20 These were the only missions on the reservation until 1860, when the Episcopal church began its work with the Sioux. Since no government schools were opened until the later fifties, despite treaty provisions for education, the missionary establishments provided the only educational opportunities available to the Indians for several years. Both Williamson and Riggs remained with the Sioux throughout the reservation period and were instrumental in organizing the first substantial effort on the part of the Indians to become farmers. Besides their other contributions, which included a short-lived periodical, the Dakota Friend, or Dakota Tawxitku Kin, the missionaries exerted some influence over the course of government policy toward the Sioux. Although their influence at this time was not as great as it became after the Civil War, when for a time the religious bodies virtually took over Indian policy, it was far from negligible. On June 6, 1850, more than a year before the treaties, the members of the Dakota Mission met at Kapozha and drew up a formal "Outline of a Plan for Civilizing the Dakotas," which Governor Ramsey later submitted to Commissioner Lea. Among other objections, they found the Sioux then living too close together in their villages and the villages too far apart, and recommended that they all be removed to the upper Minnesota and encouraged to settle there in separate family units, on tracts of land which would eventually become their individual property. A ____________________ 20 33rd Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 1, p. 315 ; Minnesota Pioneer, March 30, 1854. -96- system of laws and government should gradually be imposed upon them. The missionaries asked for an educational fund of $12,000, over which the Indians would exercise no control. They proposed village schools in which the Sioux would be taught to read and write in their own language and a system of small manual labor boarding schools in which English would be the medium of instruction. Annuities, they said, should be paid semiannually, in cash, to individual heads of families rather than to the chiefs. The object of this plan was to break up the community system among the Sioux and eliminate the favoritism that prevailed when the chiefs controlled the distribution of annuities. No money should be paid to creditors of the Indians. Finally, mixed-bloods should share in annuities and other benefits received by the Indians from the government. 21 Whether as a direct result of this outline or for other reasons, many of these provisions were written into the treaties of 1851, and others became official policy during the reservation period. The most dramatic event during Flandrau's brief term as agent was the massacre early in 1857 of a number of white settlers in the OkobojiSpirit Lake region of northwestern Iowa and the adjacent portion of Minnesota Territory by a renegade band of Wahpekutes under the leadership of an outlawed chief named Inkpaduta. The Wahpekutes had been split about 1840 by dissension leading to the murder of their old chief, Tasagi, by a rival, Wamdesapa. The followers of the latter, including Inkpaduta, had been expelled from the tribe and had since then led a nomadic life on the prairies of modern-day eastern South Dakota and adjoining parts of Iowa and Minnesota Territory. They had not taken part in the treaties of 1851, but had shown up now and then at annuity payments. According to one story, the brother of Inkpaduta had been wantonly slain, with all his family, in 1854 by a white whiskey-seller and horse thief named Henry Lott. Whatever the truth of this tale, Inkpaduta was fiercely hostile to the whites, although he concealed his hatred sufficiently when on his periodic begging expeditions among the whites, who by 1856 were beginning to settle on that remote frontier. 22 ____________________ 21 Minnesota Pioneer, November 28, 1850; Ramsey to Lea, February 6, 1851, NARS, RG 75, LR. 22 Thomas Hughes, "Causes and Results of the Inkpaduta Massacre," Minnesota Historical Collections, XII ( 1905- 1908), 264-269; Mankato Independent, August 1, 1857; Cullen to Commisioner James W. Denver, August 20, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. The literature of the Inkpaduta massacre is voluminous, and only the most useful primary and secondary sources are cited here. A good primary source is the official report of -97- The winter of 1856-1857 was unusually severe, with intense cold and much snow. Even the annuity Indians suffered, and Inkpaduta's band managed to survive only by begging and committing depredations in the white settlements. After killing a settler's dog which had bitten one of their number, they were forcibly disarmed by a posse of whites. Unable to hunt without weapons, they were incensed by this action, somehow recovered their guns or replaced them, and took out their wrath by a general slaughter of whites in the vicinity. On March 8 and 9 they descended upon a settlement on the Okoboji lakes, killed some thirtyfour people, and took three women prisoner. Then they repeated the performance a few miles farther north on Spirit Lake, where they killed a settler and took his wife prisoner. A couple of weeks later they struck at another small settlement, called Springfield, near the present site of Jackson, Minnesota, where the people had been warned of their approach and had taken refuge inside one of the houses. The Indians killed the whites who had remained outside the improvised fort, plundered the store of the Woods brothers, and then disappeared. 23 When word of the first murders reached Flandrau at the agency on March 18, he immediately enlisted the aid of the commandant at Fort Ridgely in organizing an expedition to protect the settlers at Springfield. Because of the heavy snow, which Flandrau thought rendered any military action futile, the party sent from the fort under the command of Captain Bernard E. Bee did not reach the Springfield vicinity until after the Indians had left. Attempts to catch up with them were unsuccessful, although it was later learned that the soldiers had come near enough to be seen by the Indians. It is perhaps just as well that the soldiers did not encounter their quarry, for the Indians would almost certainly have killed their captives if attacked. Upon mature consideration and after the passage of some weeks, it was decided that the safety of these women took precedence over the punishment of their captors; and early in May, Indian Bureau officials and the military commanders concluded to send out a party of friendly Indians to effect the rescue of the women before any more troops were employed. 24 Meanwhile, there was intense excitement all along the frontier and ____________________ Captain Bernard E. Bee, addressed to First Lieutenant H. E. Maynadier, Adjutant, 10th Infantry, Fort Ridgely, April 9, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency. A sound secondary source is William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, II ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1961), 400-415. 23 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 401-404. 24 Ibid., II, 404-406. -98- well behind it. The size of Inkpaduta's force, actually composed of only twelve or fourteen men and some women and children, was greatly exaggerated, and rumors of a general Indian uprising spread throughout the territory. Petitions were received at Fort Ridgely calling for assistance to settlers on the Blue Earth and Watonwan rivers; people were "flocking in from the country by hundreds terribly frightened" to the infant towns of Mankato and St. Peter; hastily formed volunteer forces satisfied their hatred for Indians by attacking harmless bands who were hunting and fishing as they did every winter. Reports reached St. Paul and Faribault that Mankato and St. Peter had been sacked and that thousands of bloodthirsty warriors were sweeping down the Minnesota valley toward St. Paul. By the time the territorial legislature met on April 27, the excitement had largely abated, but there was a loud demand for the rescue of the prisoners and the punishment of the murderers. On May 15 the legislature appropriated $10,000 (which it did not have) for the rescue of the women held by Inkpaduta's band. 25 Five days after this gesture by the legislature, two Wahpetons turned up at the Riggs mission with one of the captives, Mrs. Margaret Ann Marble, and asked $500 apiece for their efforts in ransoming her from the renegades. Their success prompted Flandrau to send out a party of three Wahpetons on the twenty-third to bring back any of the remaining captives who might still be alive. After a month they returned with Abbie Gardner, whom they had found living with a band of Yanktons; the other two women had been killed. Now that all the surviving captives had been delivered up, the way was open to the punishment of the Indians. Late in June word reached Flandrau that a member of the band, Inkpaduta's son, was at the Yellow Medicine agency. Accompanied by a small force from Fort Ridgely, he went in pursuit of the man, who was killed and his wife taken prisoner on July 1. On his return to the lower agency, Flandrau was surrounded by hostile upper Sioux, who forced him to release the woman. He was then allowed to proceed but remained a virtual prisoner at the agency until the arrival July 5 of an artillery battery from Fort Ridgely. 26 ____________________ 25 Charles E. Flandrau to Huebschmann, April 16, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR; Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, ed., History of Rice and Steele Counties ( Chicago: H. C. Cooper, Jr., and Co., 1910), I, 338; Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 406. The account in Curtiss-Wedge was written by Frederick W. Frink, who had started a newspaper in Faribault a few months before the massacre. 26 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 407-409. For greater ease of administration, a second agency was established about 1856 near the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River. From this time on, the original agency was referred to as the "lower agency" -99- The next two weeks were extremely tense at the agency. After Flandrau left to participate in the constitutional convention at St. Paul, the newly appointed superintendent of Indian affairs, William J. Cullen, was in charge of the agency. Cullen had some anxious moments, especially after a Sisseton had stabbed a soldier and the superintendent was faced with the job of arresting the Indian. After some hostile displays by the Indians, the offender was finally delivered up on July 17, but he escaped shortly thereafter and was never recaptured. During that time Cullen was also trying to persuade the Indians to undertake the punishment of Inkpaduta themselves. He was under instructions from the new Indian Commissioner, James W. Denver, to accomplish the task in this way, without the aid of troops, and was authorized to withhold all annuities until Inkpaduta and his followers had been delivered up or killed. The Indians refused to go after Inkpaduta without a military escort, and for a time there was an impasse that had ominous overtones. Finally, on July 18, Little Crow offered his services, and in the next four days an expedition of more than a hundred men was fitted out and sent on its way. When they returned, on August 4, they reported the killing of three and possibly four of the band and brought with them two women and a child; Inkpaduta and four other men, they said, had separated from the rest of the band some weeks earlier and were now far to the west. Their mission only partly accomplished, the Indians refused positively to continue the campaign without troops. Cullen and a special agent, Kintzing Prichette, who had been sent from Washington, decided that the Indians had done all they could, that it was unjust to hold all the Sioux responsible for the misdeeds of a few, and that their annuities should be paid. The commissioner finally concurred late in August, and the payment was made about the middle of the next month. 27 The Inkpaduta affair and its sequel in the crisis at the agency had profound effects on Indians and whites alike. One obvious result of the failure to punish Inkpaduta himself (he was never captured), noted at the time and later, was that the Indians learned that attacks on whites could go unpunished and that Indian Bureau officials could be induced ____________________ and the other one as the "upper agency." The Indian Office continued to use the name "St. Peter's" for both agencies. 27 Cullen to Denver, July 26 and August 20, 1857; Kintzing Prichette to Denver, August 16, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR; Mankato Independent, September 12 and October 3, 1857. The extensive correspondence carried on during and after the Inkpaduta affair by Indian Bureau officials and military officers is contained in 35th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 2, pp. 349-403. -100- to back down from previously stated positions. Another result was that white settlers on the frontier became jittery; in the following years, whenever difficulties occurred at the agency, rumors of an uprising swept the countryside. Perhaps the most significant result, in the long run, was that hostility toward the Indians increased enormously. Relations between the Sioux and their white neighbors had been passably friendly up to this time; they became progressively less so after the so-called Spirit Lake massacre. Thus the danger of a real uprising was intensified because of a shift in the attitudes of both whites and Indians. The most perceptive observations made at the time were those contained in a long report submitted by Special Agent Prichette the following October. After summarizing the events of the previous six months, he warned Commissioner Denver that the "causes of alienation" which produced the hostility of the Indians at the agency went beyond the mere temporary excitement. The complaints that he heard from the Indians at their councils all pointed to "the imperfect performance or non-fulfillment of treaty stipulations." As to the possibility of a war against the United States, he said that the chiefs who had acquired some knowledge of the strength of the nation realized that they could not permanently resist but thought that a war might lead to better treaties and thus benefit them in the long run. 28 So far as the civilization of the Sioux was concerned, Prichette believed that the hope of making them a permanent agricultural people, under existing circumstances, was "a vain dream of impracticable philanthropy." Why? Because experience had shown that "their advance towards such a condition, is but a new incitement to the desire of grasping their lands, increased in proportion, as they may have made them valuable by improvement and culture." He added the chilling comment that there was no chance of their being Christianized "so long as they are in direct contact with our own people." The only hope for the Sioux, as Prichette saw it, was their total isolation within limits "preserved and maintained inviolate by the plighted faith of the Nation." To accomplish this desired end, however, the "moral force of public opinion" would have to be enlisted. And the "moral force" of a people whose presence was a deterrent to the Christianization of the Indians was indeed a slender reed to lean on. The attitude of those people toward the Indians was suggested by an item in a Red Wing ____________________ 28 Prichette to Denver, October 15, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. Prichette said that the Indians cited Black Hawk as an example of one whose war, while outwardly futile, had actually brought more favorable treatment of the tribe afterward. -101-
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newspaper noted by Prichette: "We have plenty of young men who would like no better fun than a good Indian hunt." In Minnesota he found that "but one sentiment appeared to inspire almost the entire population, and this was, the total annihilation of the Indian race within their borders." 29 Thus the objectives of the Indian Bureau and the missionaries were impossible of attainment in the face of a populace who found no room in their world for live Indians. Hopeless though their mission may have been, the men in charge of Indian affairs went ahead with their work seemingly convinced that what they were doing would be crowned with success if they went at it intelligently, diligently, and honestly. Joseph Renshaw Brown, Flandrau's successor as agent, was a good choice for the job. He had long acquaintance with the Sioux as a trader and was married to a woman of Sioux descent. Building on the foundations laid by Flandrau, Brown inaugurated an era of real progress toward the realization of the civilization clauses in the 1851 treaties. More acreage was brought under cultivation, schools were opened, and several buildings, including at long last an agency, were erected. 30 Brown's achievement was not, of course, due entirely to his own initiative and driving energy. He had arrived on the scene when many of the Indians themselves were undergoing a fundamental change in their attitude toward farming and the white man's way of life. As game became increasingly scarce in their old hunting grounds--and as they themselves became increasingly unwelcome there--some of them began to consider more seriously the advice so persistently urged on them to cultivate the soil and live like white men. With the encouragement of missionary Riggs, a number of upper Sioux had in 1856 formed the "Hazelwood Republic," a voluntary association whose members agreed to abandon their native manners and dress and begin farming on individual allotments of land. Two years later a similar decision was made by a few of the lower Sioux, who elected a judge and council and threw off their tribal relations and customs. Superintendent Cullen ____________________ 29 Prichette to Denver, October 15, 1857, ibid.; St. Paul Daily Times, July 28, 1857. 30 35th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 2, pp. 345-349. During a brief stint as editor of the Minnesota Pioneer, Brown had written as though he accepted the prevailing notion that the Indian race was doomed to extinction and that it was only a matter of time before the new reservation would be ceded, but his conduct as agent belied this position. Likewise, although he had publicly sneered that Cullen would have been hard pressed to distinguish between a Sioux Indian and a snapping turtle, he seems to have got on well enough with his superior once installed as agent. See the Minnesota Pioneer, October 27, 1853, and the Pioneer and Democrat, July 18, 1857. -102- himself performed the symbolic act of cutting the hair of sixteen men, to each of whom he gave two suits of clothing, a cow, a yoke of oxen, and a house equipped with a cooking stove. To encourage others to follow the example, Brown that year had forty-five houses built and a small tract of two to five acres of land broken in connection with each. The following year Cullen cut the hair of a hundred more of the lower Sioux, including the chiefs Wabasha and Wacouta, and a hundred houses were framed. By this time the Indians were cutting their own rails and making fences, and in 1860 the use of white men for agricultural labor was abandoned and the work turned over to the Indians. 31 Accepting the widespread conviction that individual ownership of land was essential to the civilization of the Sioux, Brown proposed to allot an eighty-acre tract to each head of family or other adult, with the expectation that eventually the Indians would qualify for fee patents to those allotments and become citizens. Since only that part of the reservation south of the Minnesota would be required for this purpose, the proposal was advanced by Cullen in his report to the commissioner in 1857 to dispose of the remainder of the reservation and use the receipts for the benefit of the Indians. Such a proposal would naturally meet with the favor of the white population of Minnesota, many of whom were already squatting on parts of the reservation. When the chiefs made their usual request for permission to visit Washington, Cullen took advantage of the opportunity to suggest to Acting Commissioner Charles E. Mix that this might be a good time to "effect a readjustment of their treaty" as he had advised in his annual report. 32 The result of this combination of circumstances was the treaty of June 19, 1858, the principal outcome of a four-month visit to Washington and the East by a selected group of chiefs representing both upper and lower Sioux. Actually two treaties, one with each division of the Santees but signed the same day, this document provided for the allotment in severalty of the southern half of the reservation, with the excess land to be held in common for the future use of the tribe, the allotments to be exempt from taxation, sale, or alienation in other ways even after patents had been issued. (The tax-exempt status could be altered by ____________________ 31 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1858, p. 50; Cullen to Denver, December 7, 1858; Cullen to Commissioner A. B. Greenwood, August 13, 1859; Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, April 15, 1860, NARS, RG 75, LR; 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 280. Cullen claimed to have cut the hair of two hundred men at the 1859 payment, but Brown's official report says one hundred. 32 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1857, p. 51; Cullen to Mix, December 24, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. -103- the state legislature with the consent of Congress.) It also authorized the Senate to determine whether the Indians had a sound title to the reservation, and if so, what compensation should be paid them for the northern half. Provision was also made for the payment of "just debts" and for the building of roads across the reservation, and there was a significant clause which amended all previous treaty stipulations regarding the payment of specific sums for particular purposes and left the management of those sums to the discretion of the President. 33 This treaty was really an astonishing document, when one considers how much the Indians left to the discretion of the Senate or the President. In view of their experience in 1851, they might have been expected to drive a hard bargain and get all they could. Instead, they granted the government virtually carte blanche to do as it pleased with them and their property, including what they were entitled to under the terms of earlier treaties. As a matter of fact, there is some evidence that Little Crow, at least, put up a show of resistance. During the allnight council that climaxed the long stay in Washington, he told Commissioner Mix that "we have been so often cheated that I wished to be cautious, and not sign any more papers without having them explained, so that we may know what we are doing." There followed a dispute between the two, in the course of which Mix accused the chief of acting like a child. But the result was a foregone conclusion. After a "warm and protracted discussion," as one newspaper called it, the treaty was signed at 7 A.M., and the next day the delegation started for home, "strengthened in their purpose by what they [had] seen during their sojourn." 34 The aftermath was in some respects even more interesting than the treaty itself. Although the Senate ratified the treaties on March 9, 1859, and they were proclaimed at the end of that month, nothing was done toward determining the validity of the Indians' title to their reservation until 1860, more than two years after the signing of the treaty. Then the Senate confirmed the Indians' title and allowed them the sum of thirty cents an acre for the area relinquished. This was a better price than the Senate amendments to the 1851 treaties had allowed them-ten cents an acre--but the 1860 resolution also gave settlers on those lands the right of pre-emption at a price of $1.25 an acre!35 Brown ____________________ 33 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 781-789. 34 Pioneer and Democrat, June 29 and July 8, 1858. 35 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 789. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs had recommended that the Indians be paid at the rate of $1.25 an acre. See Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 397. -104- thought the lands worth five dollars an acre. There was still worse to follow. When Congress finally appropriated $266,880 for the lands, nearly all of the payment to the lower Sioux and a large part of that to the upper bands went to pay the "just debts" of the traders, and the Indians saw but little of the money. Thus the disillusionment and bitterness they had come to feel toward the government was compounded by this treaty, supposedly designed for their benefit. 36 At the same time, other difficulties were doing much to negate the effectiveness of Brown's work in civilizing the Sioux. There was, for example, the never ending feud with the Chippewas. Alexander Ramsey had tried in 1850 to resolve the quarrel by the usual method of calling a council, which ended with the contending parties in total disagreement. 37 The raids and counterraids continued through the years, despite the removal of the Sioux to their reservation and the gradual filling up of the ceded territory with white settlers. When the government intervened, as it did in 1856, its hesitant and inconsistent policy did nothing either to diminish the warfare or to raise its own prestige with the Indians. 38 As a matter of fact, the government was rapidly losing the respect of the Sioux during these years. The agency warehouse was plundered in 1855, in 1856, and again in 1858, and no decisive retaliatory action was taken. The arrogance which this failure engendered among the dissatisfied Indians was heightened by the growing hostility of the Yanktons and Yanktonais, who resented the cession in 1851 of lands to which they thought they had a claim, and who sometimes showed up at annuity payments and extorted a "cut" from the Sissetons. In 1857 they burned several buildings and drove off white settlers who had established townsites in the area west of the present Minnesota line. 39 ____________________ 36 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 393-400. 37 Minnesota Pioneer, June 13, 1850; Ramsey to Orlando Brown, June 15, 1850, NARS, RG 75, LR, Minnesota Superintendency. 38 Newspapers of the time and correspondence of the Indian Bureau contain numerous references to continued raids, including one in which a party of Chippewas invaded the heart of St. Paul and fired into a store that some Sioux had entered. See the Minnesota Pioneer, April 28, 1853. As late as 1860 a Red Wing newspaper noted that about two hundred of Wacouta's band had gone over into the Wisconsin timber to hunt. In January a few members of the band appeared in Red Wing with furs and venison which they traded for provisions to take back to the rest of their party. Hunting had been good, they said; they had bagged over a hundred deer, twenty bears, and four Chippewas. See the Red Wing Sentinel, November 12, 1859, and January 7, 1860. 39 Huebschmann to Manypenny, June 28, 1856; Huebschmann to Colonel E. B. Abercrombie, June 13, 1856; Flandrau to Cullen, August 7, 1857; Joseph R. Brown to Mix, May 23, 1858; Cullen to Mix, July 1, 1858, NARS, RG 75, LR. -105- The Yanktons were partially mollified by a treaty in 1858 confirming to them the Pipestone quarry, which was within the cession made in 1851, but the Yanktonais remained hostile and wanted no dealings with the United States government. The Indian Bureau finally decided to pacify them by the distribution of some goods, and in 1859 Cullen was delegated to handle the business at the time of the regular annuity payments. After paying off the lower Sioux, he stopped at the upper agency, located near the Yellow Medicine River, learned that the census rolls were not complete, and decided to make his visit to the Yanktonais before paying the upper bands. The Indians demanded their annuities, however, and would not permit him to pass their lines, a few miles above the agency. After some inconclusive wrangling, they seized the bridles of Cullen's horses and turned them around so that they were headed back toward the lower agency. Cullen had no choice but to return to the agency, where he sent in a request for troops from Fort Ridgely. With military aid, he was able to get past the angry Sissetons on a second attempt, and later the Indians who had treated him so roughly were jailed. 40 Another source of trouble in the later fifties was the constant danger of clashes between Indians and white settlers. Despite a congressional appropriation in 1854 and repeated appeals by the agents and superintendents for a survey of the reservation boundaries, nothing was done until 1859 (and then done badly), by which time the General Land Office had already surveyed the adjacent territory and opened to settlement several townships wholly or partly within the reservation. The Indians, who had been accustomed to depredations in the white settlements farther east all through the decade, were even less inclined to respect the supposed rights of the settlers who innocently took up lands in these townships. The Indian Office was perpetually deluged with settlers' claims for damages, sometimes accompanied by petitions signed by large numbers of citizens and threatening drastic action in retaliation for the depredations. 41 Some of these claims were undoubtedly legitimate, but many prob- ____________________ 40 Cullen to Greenwood, June 24, 1859, and August 15, 1859, ibid.; Mankato Weekly Record, July 5 and 12, 1859. 41 U. S. Statutes at Large, X, 331; Henry M. Rice to Manypenny, January 18, 1855; Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, September 12 and December 5, 1858, and November 2, 1859; C. L. Emerson, Surveyor General, to Thomas A. Hendricks, Commissioner of the General Land Office, February 8, 1859; S. A. Smith, Commissioner of the General Land Office, to Greenwood, December 15, 1859, NARS, RG 75, LR; Mankato Weekly Record, November 1, 1859. -106- ably represented nothing more than a desire to get some money out of the government. And Special Agent Prichette was doubtless right when he analyzed the motives behind the repeated demands for volunteer forces to drive the Indians out: "The object of this in certain quarters is to occupy important points, in advance, as the nucleus of settlements, with a view to speculation in town sites. . . ." 42 During Brown's last years in office, perhaps the most serious trouble at the agency stemmed from the growing hostility between those Indians who wished to adopt the manners of the whites and those who violently opposed any such move toward civilization. When the customary techniques of ridicule failed to deter the "farmer Indians" from their purpose, the "blanket" faction inaugurated a more or less systematic campaign of harassment intended to make life so uncomfortable for the farmers that they would abandon their efforts. Beginning with such forms of petty persecution as burning haystacks or stables, the campaign soon advanced to the stage of cattle-killing and from that point proceeded to the stage of open threats against the lives of those who persisted in the face of such persecution. In the winter of 1860 the farmer Indians were warned that no man who wore pantaloons the next summer would see the leaves fall. 43 It took a great deal of courage for a man to continue farming in the face of such threats, especially among the upper Sioux, where the anticivilization group was in the vast majority. In the spring of 1860 a succession of murders and retaliations led to the breakup of the Hazelwood Republic and the abandonment by its members of their claims. In August, 1860, an Indian of Mankato's band who had been shooting oxen used to haul materials for the building of houses announced that he would kill men as well as animals if necessary to stop the erection of more houses. Since Mankato was a chief of the lower Sioux, it was evident that by this time the infection was spreading down the Minnesota. Superintendent Cullen, like Brown, recognized the menace to their whole program and wrote the commissioner that summer: "There is no doubt that at the present time a great struggle for ascendancy is ____________________ 42 Prichette to Denver, July 28, 1857, NARS, RG 75, LR. 43 Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, August 21, 1859; Brown to "Dear Col.," February 3, 1860; Brown to Cullen, February 6, 1860, ibid. Some of these threats were carried out in 1859 and 1860. The usual method was to induce the victim to drink whiskey and then draw him into a quarrel when he was drunk, thus making his death appear the result of one of the drunken altercations that were becoming increasingly common on the reservation as the proximity of white settlements made the introduction of liquor much easier than it had been before. -107-
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taking place among the Sioux between the civilized or improvement Indians who have adopted our habits and customs and those who still retain the savage mode of life." 44 But aside from imprisoning the insurgent who wanted to stop the building of houses, there was not a great deal the agent or superintendent could do without military assistance; and there were never enough troops at Fort Ridgely for any of them to be spared for continuous duty at the agency. By 1860, therefore, it was clear that Agent Brown, his white and Indian employees, the missionaries, and the farmer Indians were sitting on a powder keg. The more successful Brown was in his efforts to make farmers out of the Indians, the more opposition was stirred up and the more violent it became. His hope was that, with the aid of troops to protect the farmers, he could induce enough Indians to follow their example so that they would constitute a majority. This goal seemed almost within sight among the lower Sioux, but at the same time the opposition there was growing at an alarming rate. Some of the most hostile of the upper Sioux were no longer showing up for their annuities, but had taken up residence with their wild Yanktonai cousins; at the same time the presence of those cousins just west of the reservation constituted a perpetual menace. What might have happened if Brown had been permitted to stay on the job for a few more years must forever remain in the realm of conjecture. The vagaries of political expediency dictated that he and nearly all of his employees, as well as Superintendent Cullen, should be turned out of office when a new administration took over in 1861 and replaced by inexperienced men who had been faithful servants of their party in the campaign of 1860. ____________________ 44 Joseph R. Brown to Cullen, March 3, May 17, and August 11, 1860; Brown to Captain G. A. De Russy, August 10, 1860; Cullen to Greenwood, July 16, 1 86), ibid. -108-
· 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: *
· 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: *
· 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: *
· 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: *
· 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: * CHAPTER 6 Catastrophe THE TIME-HONORED practice of "cleaning out" officeholders of the defeated party and replacing them with stalwarts who had contributed to an election victory was never more sweepingly followed than by the Republicans after the election of 1860. In the Indian Service the process went so far, in some instances, as to include physicians, blacksmiths, and laborers. Among the Minnesotans who expected--and received-rewards for their service to the party were three men who were to be associated with the Santee Sioux in the next few years. Clark W. Thompson replaced Cullen as Northern Superintendent, Thomas J. Galbraith was nominated to the position of Sioux agent, and St. André Durand Balcombe was given the Winnebago Agency. None had had any previous experience with Indians. Of these three the one who had the most to do with the Sioux before the outbreak of 1862 was, of course, Galbraith. Though a man of ability and probably of integrity, he was handicapped not only by his inexperience but by traits of character and personality that would have made him a dubious choice for the job of Indian agent at any time, and an extremely unwise selection for the post he received in the spring of 1861. His official letters show him to have been a man supremely confident of his own rectitude, scornful of advice, inclined to oversimplify situations, and doggedly determined to cling to his interpretation of a situation and to justify his course of action afterward, regardless of the -109- consequences that might have followed. By the testimony of men who had no reason, decades later, to hold a grudge against him, he was arrogant, stubborn, emotionally unstable, and a hard drinker. John P. Williamson, son of the old missionary to the Sioux, wrote, as the Indians were being shipped into exile in 1863, that he hoped Galbraith would not appear at their new home. Galbraith's political enemies charged him with cowardice--an accusation that receives some support from the military men who observed him under stress just before the uprising. 1 All this attention to the character and personality of Galbraith will not seem irrelevant if it is remembered that when Little Crow began to negotiate with Colonel Sibley in the dying days of the uprising, he started his letter with these words: "Dear Sir: For what reason we have commenced this war I will tell you, it is on account of Maj. Galbrait. . . ." 2 The causes of the Sioux Uprising are manifold and complex, but it is no exaggeration to say that Thomas J. Galbraith had more to do with bringing on the war than any other single individual. If the picture of him that emerges from contemporaneous and later testimony and from his own correspondence is substantially correct, his appointment as Sioux agent was a political blunder of major proportions. When Galbraith arrived at the agency in May, 1861, he found the Indians disturbed by a rumor, allegedly spread by southern sympathizers, that the annuities would not be paid that summer. He denied this report and was able to make the payment almost on schedule, but not without military help and not without difficulty. The upper bands, described by the agent as "restive, turbulent, saucy, insolent, impudent and insulting," were furious over the deduction of some $9,000 from their annuities to pay depredations claims. Deductions for that purpose ____________________ 1 William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, II ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1961), 222 n.; Mankato Semi-Weekly Record, September 10 and October 1, 1861; Lucius F. Hubbard and Return I. Holcombe, Minnesota in Three Centuries ( Mankato: Publishing Society of Minnesota, 1908), III, 292-295. Folwell quotes Judge Martin J. Severance as saying, in an interview with the local historian Thomas Hughes, more than forty years after the uprising, that Galbraith "had no diplomacy and treated the Indians arrogantly," and adding that he was wholly unfit for his job. Holcombe's account of troubles at the upper agency in 1862, apparently based on interviews with Lieutenant Timothy J. Sheehan, includes the story that Galbraith tried to bolster his spirits with "Dutch courage," i.e., whiskey. 2 Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, p. 444. -110- had long been customary, but never had the amount been so great, nor the evidence to support the claims so skimpy. 3 Although Galbraith forwarded to his superiors a memorial from the Indians protesting to Congress against this extortion, he showed no comprehension of certain other manifestations of their hostility. The most acutely dissatisfied and turbulent elements had formed a "soldiers' lodge," an institution observed as early as Hennepin's time and designed to enforce a temporary discipline on the normally anarchic Sioux. Galbraith supposed this organization to be identical with the anti-civilization faction that had caused so much unrest during Brown's last years as agent. No doubt the two groups included many of the same individuals, but Galbraith's insistence that they were the same organization was an oversimplification of the situation, as was his attempt to trace the origins of the group to Inkpaduta's band of renegades. He also succumbed to the conspiracy theory, so often used by Americans to explain the inexplicable, and exaggerated the influence of "rebel emissaries." 4 The Civil War did, however, unquestionably complicate the government's problem of meeting its obligations to the Indians. Whatever the influence of "Copperheads," the Indians could see with their own eyes that the government was neglecting some of its responsibilities to them and that the country was being drained of young white men to fill the Union armies. Coupled with newspaper reports of defeats suffered by these armies, such observations inevitably led some of the Indians, already smoldering with resentment toward the government for its treatment of them, to wonder if the time might be approaching for them to strike back. The virtual loss of the corn crop to cutworms in 1861, followed by a winter of near-starvation, increased their discontent and spread it to people who heretofore had been largely passive. The two months immediately preceding the outbreak of August, ____________________ 3 Thomas J. Galbraith to Clark W. Thompson, June 4 and July 3 1, 1861; Cyrus Aldrich to Commissioner William P. Dole, July 16, 1861, NARS, RG 75, LR. $5,500 of the sum charged against the Indians was for losses allegedly suffered by the trading firm of Carothers and Blake, whose post on Big Stone Lake had been robbed by some Indians. The Sioux considered the amount extortionate, in view of the fact that the robbery had been committed by two men, who could not possibly have run off with goods to that amount. They especially resented the fact that they had known nothing of the deduction until Galbraith informed them of it just before the payment. 4 Galbraith to Thompson, July 30, 1861, ibid. -111- 1862, were a period of alternating tension and relaxation. As the customary time for the annuity payments drew near, the Indians became increasingly anxious. The same rumors that had unsettled them the previous year sprang up anew, spread in some cases by the traders, who refused to extend further credit to the Indians on the ground that there would be no annuities from which the debts could be paid. Late in June representatives of the upper bands obtained assurance from Galbraith that the payment would be made, although not before July 20. On July 14, by which time the goods and provisions had arrived but not the money, Galbraith was confronted with some five thousand hungry Indians, including a thousand Yanktonais, demanding that the provisions be issued. In keeping with his inflexible character, he refused to make a separate issue of provisions and insisted that the whole payment await the arrival of the money, as was the established procedure. 5 Although Galbraith did, under pressure, dole out enough food to keep the Indians alive, they did not go home as he wished them to do, and on August 4 violence broke out. Despite the presence of a detachment of troops from Fort Ridgely, the Indians decided that the time had come to go after the provisions, so tantalizingly near in the warehouse, trusting that they would be able to get away with it. After first surrounding the troops, whom they had previously advised that there would be a peaceful demonstration, they sent a party of braves to assault the warehouse door and carry off the provisions. Before they could get more than a few sacks of flour out, the military commander, Lieutenant Timothy J. Sheehan, trained one of his two howitzers on the door and then marched into the warehouse via the lane speedily formed by the Indians. Here he confronted Galbraith, who, according to some accounts, was too frightened to do anything on his own initiative, and urged him to make an issue of provisions to the Indians. 6 A small issue was made, but it did not satisfy the Indians, who still refused to leave until all their provisions were distributed. After two more days of tension the agent, on the advice of missionary Riggs and the military commander, held a council and offered to issue the annuity goods and provisions on condition that the Indians would then go home and not ____________________ 5 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 228-229. By common consensus, the best history of the Sioux Uprising, its causes, and its consequences is that by Folwell, pp. 109-301, and appendix, pp. 361 - 450. Because that volume has been readily accessible since its republication in 1961, in the following account citations are provided only for quotations and other information not found in Folwell. 6 Hubbard and Holcombe, Minnesota in Three Centuries, III, 295. -112-
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return until summoned to receive the money annuities. The issue was then made, and on August 10 the Indians left the agency. 7 The delay in the arrival of the money annuity was due in part to the exigencies of the war, in part to an experiment undertaken the previous year by the new administration. According to the best available evidence, it had been decided to shift from a cash annuity to one paid in goods. A start in that direction had been made in 1861, when a $20,000 advance on the 1862 cash annuity was paid in goods. The Indians objected so strenuously to the loss this would entail in their cash annuities for the next year that the Indian Bureau was persuaded to make up the deficiency out of the projected 1863 annuities. This course meant that the payment would have to await passage of the Indian appropriations act for 1863, which was not finally approved until July 5, 1862. Then the question arose as to whether the payment might not be made in greenbacks rather than in the customary gold coin. This issue was not settled until early in August, just about the time that matters were becoming critical at the Yellow Medicine agency. After some correspondence between Superintendent Thompson and Commissioner Dole, in which Thompson warned of the danger of an outbreak, $70,000 in coin was finally sent. The money arrived in St. Paul on August 16, just in time to reach Fort Ridgely at noon on the eighteenth, "by which hour some hundred white people lay in or about their homes dead or bleeding from wounds," as Folwell says. 8 In all the troubles that the successive agents had had with the Sioux in the previous three or four years, it was the upper bands, sometimes in conjunction with the Yanktonais, who received the blame. True, the lower bands had the heaviest grievances. They had had to leave their old homes, as most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons had not; they had seen their payment under the 1858 treaty diverted to the traders, while the upper bands received at least something; and they were the principal sufferers from white intrusion on the reservation. Yet through all the years of turmoil at the Yellow Medicine the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes had remained apparently docile. If the Sioux Uprising had been the carefully matured conspiracy that some contemporary observers believed it to be, all logic would have pointed to the upper bands as the ones most likely to erupt in violence. Why, then, was it the lower Sioux who did most of the fighting when the uprising came---and suffered most of the punishment? The answer is that the outbreak came ____________________ 7 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 230. 8 Ibid., II, 238; Thompson to Dole, August 5, 1862, NARS, RG 75, LR. -113- about by accident, not by plan, and that the accident which produced it involved the lower Sioux more immediately than the upper. Yet it was not entirely blind chance. In the last days before the war began, several events happened that brought tempers to the boiling point among the lower Sioux. First of all, Little Crow seems to have been present at the payment reluctantly made by Galbraith to the upper bands on August 8 and 9, at which time he obtained a promise that a similar issue of provisions would be made at the lower agency. This promise was not kept. About a week later a council was held between the Indians, represented by Little Crow, and the traders and Galbraith. When no information was received as to the time of the payment and no concessions were made in the matter of credit by the traders, Little Crow is supposed to have announced grimly: "We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves." Galbraith, apparently unequal to making a decision himself, turned to the traders and asked them what they would do. After some consultation among themselves, their spokesman, Andrew J. Myrick, first tried to evade the issue by leaving, but when called back by the agent, snarled: "So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass." When this incredibly heartless remark was interpreted for the Indians by the younger Williamson, "there was a moment of silence, followed by savage whoops and wild gestures, with which the Indians disappeared." 9 Yet even the calculated insult of Andrew Myrick did not of itself bring on the Sioux Uprising, though it rankled in the minds of Little Crow and his people and turned up later in the chief's letter to Sibley. The highly inflammable situation on the Sioux reservation in midAugust, 1862, required something to ignite it--some incident that would lead the Indians to feel that they had nothing to lose by going to war, that their hand had been forced, and that there was no retreat for them. Such an incident was provided on August 17, about forty miles ____________________ 9 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 233. In Little Crow's letter to Sibley he accuses Myrick of telling the Indians that they could eat grass "or their own dung." See Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, p. 444. Victorian reticence may account for the omission of the last phrase from Winifred W. Barton's mention of the incident, on which Folwell relies. See her biography, John P. Williamson, a Brother to the Sioux ( Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1919), pp. 18, 46, 48-52. -114- from the agency, in Acton township, Meeker County. That Sunday morning four young men, members of a band that had seceded from Shakopee's village, were returning from a hunting expedition. The discovery of some hen's eggs along a fence on the land of a white settler led to an argument as to whether one of the party was brave enough to kill a white man. A dare was made and taken, and they went on to the home of the settler, Robinson Jones. Before the morning was over, Jones, his wife, an adopted daughter, and two other white men lay dead, and the four Indians were hurrying back to the reservation. The "Acton Massacre," trivial in its causes, is credited with setting off the bloody conflict known to history as the Sioux Uprising. But for the combination of circumstances existing among the Sioux at that time, the Acton killings might have had no more serious consequences than the Inkpaduta affair of 1857. The culprits would have been delivered up to the authorities for punishment; or if they fled, pressure would have been put on the chiefs to have them captured, or perhaps troops would have been sent after them. But in August, 1862, the Indians were not disposed to wait to see what the white men would do. Little Crow may have believed that "the whites would take a dreadful vengeance because women had been killed," as he said in justification of his decision for war, but the Sioux had sufficient reasons for opening hostilities without this fear. Most of their grievances have already been mentioned: bitterness over the treaties of 1851; the nonfulfillment or tardy fulfillment by the government of obligations incurred under the terms of those treaties; the treaty of 1858 and the deception (as the Indians saw it) practiced upon them in turning over most of the proceeds from the ceded lands to the traders; the highhanded manner in which the white authorities had sought to punish the whole Sioux nation for the misbehavior of the outlaw Inkpaduta; the advantage which the Indians believed, with reason, was being taken of them by their traders; the increasing pressure of white settlement near and even on the reservation, which, coupled with the uncertainty of the Indians' tenure, seemed to foreshadow a time when they would again be bullied into signing a treaty and be forced to move once more. To these grievances should be added a few others, mentioned by the Indians themselves and therefore evidently of substantial moment in their thinking. Some thirty years after the uprising, Big Eagle, one of the chiefs who had opposed war at the start but had later fought in most of the battles, told of the reasons his people had when they began a conflict which even some of their leaders recognized as suicidal from -115- the start. Besides objecting to the sharp practices of the traders, whose word was always accepted in preference to that of an Indian, who kept no books, and to the abuse of Indian women by white men, Big Eagle complained of the agents' efforts to induce the Indians to become farmers. His words provide an insight into the Indians' point of view: Then the whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men--go to farming, work hard and do as they did--and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway. It seemed too sudden to make such a change. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians. 10 Underlying all of these actions that Big Eagle found objectionable was the ingrained and apparently ineradicable racial arrogance of the white man. Big Eagle said: "Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, 'I am much better than you,' and the Indians did not like this." 11 The same attitude of superiority is expressed in somewhat more sophisticated fashion in Galbraith's official report for 1863, in which he says: "To be clear, 'the habits and customs of white men are at war with the habits and customs of the Indians.' The former are civilization, industry, thrift, economy; the latter, idleness, superstition, and barbarism. . . ." 12 The insufferable smugness and complacency of the white man finds its ultimate expression in the words of Charles A. Bryant, historian of the uprising. The conflict of Indian and white he saw as "a conflict of knowledge with ignorance, of right with wrong"; since the Indian did not obey the divine injunction to subdue the earth, he was "in the wrongful possession of a continent required by the superior right of the white man." 13 Big Eagle never read Bryant's book. If he had done so, perhaps he would have been impelled to precipitate another uprising. ____________________ 10 Return I. Hotcombe, ed., "A Sioux Story of the War," Minnesota Historical Collections, VI ( 1894), 384. 11 Ibid., 385. 12 Quoted in Charles S. Bryant and Abel B. Murch, A History of the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians in Minnesota ( Cincinnati: Rickey and Carroll, 1864), p. 51. Galbraith offered as a "settled fact" in his mind the theory that "the encroachments of Christianity, and its handmaid civilization, upon the habits and customs of the Sioux Indians, is the cause of the late terrible Sioux outbreak." Although to Galbraith the fault, of course, lay with the Sioux, he conceded (or perhaps boasted) that Christianity had in most instances "waded to success through seas of blood. . . ." See ibid., p. 50. 13 Ibid., pp. 48-49. The title page of Bryant's book bears the legend: "For that which is unclean by nature thou canst entertain no hope; no washing will turn the Gipsy white. Ferdousi." -116- The military history of the Sioux Uprising has been told and retold so many times and in such detail that only the general outlines need to be sketched in here. When the Acton murderers returned to their village on Rice Creek on the evening of August 17, they made known the events of the day to the chief of their band, Hochokaduta, who sought the counsel of Shakopee. There seems to have been a general consensus that war was inevitable and might as well be initiated by the Indians, but before taking the fatal step these Indians naturally wanted to enlist the widest possible support from the other bands. A council was held that night at Little Crow's house, and his leadership in the forthcoming action was finally obtained. According to the received tradition, Little Crow recognized the futility of a war against the whites and argued against it until he was taunted with cowardice, whereupon he agreed to lead his warriors and ordered the massacre to begin the next morning at the lower agency. Little Crow had recently been defeated in a contest for speaker of the lower Sioux, and it is supposed that he saw the opportunity now offered him as a chance to regain face. 14 The war broke in full fury on the morning of August 18. Soon after daylight a party of warriors attacked the lower agency, killing all the whites they could find, including both such long-time friends as Philander Prescott and men they had good reason to hate, such as trader Myrick, whose mouth they stuffed with grass. Soon they fell to looting the agency stores, however, and thus permitted many of the whites to escape by way of the ferry to the north side of the Minnesota and from there to Fort Ridgely. Since the uprising soon became general and spread over the countryside, some of them were killed before they could reach the safety of the fort. Likewise, settlers on both sides of the river were killed in great numbers during the first forty-eight hours of the war. News of the outbreak did not reach the upper agency at once, and when it did there was sharp division among the Sissetons and Wahpetons as to whether they should join. In later years members of those tribes were to insist that the uprising was all the work of the lower bands. This claim was exaggerated, but it does appear that the element opposed to the war was strong enough among the upper Sioux to prevent their wholehearted participation. Most of the whites at the upper ____________________ 14 Holcombe, "A Sioux Story of the War,"387. Big Eagle says that the Sioux looked upon the war as a means of healing dissension that had broken out in the tribe. For an imaginative reconstruction of what Little Crow may have said on this occasion, see "Taoyateduta Is Not a Coward," Minnesota History, XXXVIII ( September 1962), 115. This oration is supposed to have been obtained from Little Crow's son, Wowinapa, after his capture. -117- agency were able to escape on August 19, with the help of the faithful John Other Day. The agency buildings, however, were burned and looted there, too. It should be pointed out that most of the principal chiefs of both the lower and upper Sioux, such as Wabasha, Wacouta, Traveling Hail (who had won the election for speaker), Red Iron, and Standing Buffalo, were opposed to the uprising and either took no part or joined very reluctantly in a few battles, meanwhile giving all the aid they safely could to white victims. The Sioux were at no time united, at no time committed as a nation to the purposes of the hostile minority. Furthermore, even those chiefs who did take an active part in hostilities were able to exercise no really effective discipline over their men. These facts go far to explain why the Sioux Uprising was so brief in comparison with other Indian wars, despite certain initial advantages to the Indians, such as that of almost total surprise. The Sioux Uprising divides itself into two phases: a short period of about a week when the Indians were on the offensive, and a longer period when they were gradually driven back by growing military forces. Even during the former period they won only one engagement, the battle of Redwood Ferry. As soon as news of the killings at the lower agency reached Fort Ridgely, the commander of the post, Captain John S. Marsh, set out for the agency, about thirteen miles upstream and across the river, with forty-six men and an interpreter. He and his men were ambushed at the ferry, and more than half the party killed. Marsh himself was drowned. Indian losses are supposed to have been one killed. The one-sided outcome of this skirmish was due mainly to Marsh's ignorance of the danger into which he was plunging himself and his men, but it had the effect of convincing the Indians that they could kill white men like sheep. Their overconfidence led them to exert less than their fullest energies in later, more important battles and thus indirectly contributed to their ultimate defeat. The Sioux leaders were not without some conception of strategy. Although the uprising had not been planned in detail, there had doubtless been discussion at various times of the best way to conduct a war against the whites. Two points had to be taken to open the way for a sweep down the Minnesota valley: Fort Ridgely and the German town of New Ulm, on the south bank of the river a few miles below the reservation. Little Crow and other astute chiefs recognized that Fort Ridgely was the more vital and wished to attack that point first, but they were over- -118-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:32:44 GMT -5
ruled by the young braves, who were attracted by the prospects of plunder in the poorly defended town. This lack of control over their warriors cost the Sioux leaders the opportunity to attack either position in full force, though either might have been taken with comparatively slight loss in the first two days of the war. New Ulm was attacked twice, once on August 19 and again on the twenty-third. The first attack was a badly planned and badly coordinated affair and failed to accomplish its purpose or to inflict many casualties. The second, however, was a major assault, directed with some skill by competent Sioux leaders. With the advantage of superior numbers, the Indians nearly took the town. By that time the defenders had been reinforced, however, and they were finally able to turn back the assault, at a cost of thirty-four dead and sixty wounded and the loss by fire of most of the town, which was evacuated two days later. As Big Eagle was to say later, the defenders of New Ulm had "kept the door shut" to the projected push down the valley. Between the two attacks on New Ulm an even more important battle was taking place at Fort Ridgely. Had the Indians attacked on the eighteenth or the nineteenth, as Little Crow wished to do, they could almost certainly have taken the fort, which was woefully undermanned after the debacle at Redwood Ferry. By the twentieth, however, when they finally did attack, reinforcements had come, and the Indians were unable to penetrate the fort's defenses without incurring heavier losses than their concept of warfare permitted. Attacking from concealed positions in ravines nearby, Little Crow and his warriors (probably fewer than four hundred) were driven back by artillery fire and finally abandoned the assault. After a day of heavy rain, they attacked again on the twenty-second, at least eight hundred strong, but failed to set fire to the rain-soaked roofs and were driven out of outlying buildings they had briefly occupied. The Indians then launched a final great assault which, well conceived and well directed, might very well have succeeded but for the devastating fire of the twenty-four-pound cannon. The second battle of Fort Ridgely was no mere raid or ambush; it was real war. Some hint of its ferocity can be gained from the official report, which concluded: "Thus, after six hours of continuous blazing conflict, alternately lit up by the flames of burning buildings and darkened by whirling clouds of smoke, terminated the second and last attack." 15 ____________________ 15 Board of Commissioners, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861-1865, I I ( St. Paul: Pioneer Press Co. [ 1893]), 186. -119- The military importance of the battles of Fort Ridgely, like those at New Ulm, is that they halted the momentum of the Sioux campaign, disrupted the strategy of the Indian leaders, and prevented the realization of the dream of a grand sweep down the Minnesota valley all the way to Fort Snelling. While the main body of the Sioux warriors was alternately attacking Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, smaller parties were carrying out raids all over southwestern Minnesota. Among the places where white casualties were heavy were Milford Township in Brown County, Lake Shetek in Murray County, and portions of Kandiyohi County. In most cases the men were killed, the women and children taken prisoner and held until the final defeat of the Indians at Wood Lake. Much of our information about the uprising comes from the stories told by those captives. In addition to a good deal of brutality, these accounts frequently tell of kindness and even heroism on the part of individual Indians toward their white prisoners. Early accounts of the uprising seized upon the occasional instances of torture and mutilation, exaggerated them, and conjured up a picture of wholesale atrocities unparalleled in the history of Indian warfare. Some of the stories revel in details of babies nailed living to walls, of unborn infants torn from the maternal womb and flung in the faces of the dying mothers, of bodies hacked up beyond all recognition. Like Falstaff's story of the men he battled, however, the closer these stories are scrutinized, the less foundation there seems to be for them. Although the earth between Fort Ridgely and the lower agency was supposed to be virtually carpeted with multilated bodies, Dr. Jared W. Daniels, who accompanied a burial party and who should have recognized cases of mutilation if anyone would, categorically denied that the corpses he saw had been mutilated. Atrocities there no doubt were, as there have been in every war since the beginning of time, and they were not all committed by the Indians. But these isolated instances were multiplied in the imagination of refugees and their details exaggerated to such a degree that the early accounts can no longer be accepted by sober scholarship. 16 Before the momentum of the Sioux attack had spent itself, countermeasures were put into motion by state officials, and soon the initiative assed from the Indians to their enemies. As soon as Governor Alexander Ramsey learned of the first attacks, he commissioned former ____________________ 16 Governor Ramsey gave official sanction to the atrocity stories by repeating some of the most lurid in his special message to the legislature, September 9, 1862, printed in Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, pp. 3-15 (extra session). -120-
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: * Governor Henry H. Sibley to lead an expedition against the Sioux, with whom Sibley had traded and hunted in years past. Quickly assembling a force, Sibley moved toward the theater of war, and by August 27 his advance guard had reached Fort Ridgely, whose garrison was greatly strengthened by the arrival of the additional troops. After his arrival on the twenty-eighth, Sibley awaited reinforcements and sent out a party to reconnoiter and to bury any bodies they found. This party, under the over-all command of Joseph R. Brown, unwittingly provided the Indians with another chance to defeat the whites, an opportunity of which they again did not take full advantage. A portion of Brown's force camped on the night of September 1 near a small stream called Birch Coulee, across the river from the lower agency. Like Fort Ridgely, the site could easily be approached from cover, a fact which did not escape the Indians' notice. They began an attack before sunrise and continued it all day, with gradually decreasing intensity. Not until late on the morning of the third were the besieged troops relieved by forces sent out by Sibley. Thirteen killed and fortyseven wounded--the heaviest military losses of the war--were the result of an unwise selection of a campsite; as at the other battles, the Indian losses were slight--two killed, according to Big Eagle. Although Little Crow was able to launch attacks on outlying settlements like Forest City and Hutchinson and although raids were to continue for many months, the fury of the uprising was spent by early September, and the main task facing the military commanders was to convince the Indians that they could not win and that the sooner they surrendered the better it would be for them. To take advantage of any wavering of purpose that might exist among the hostiles, Sibley had left a message for Little Crow on the Birch Coulee battlefield in hopes of opening negotiations for the release of the captives. A reply, dated September 7, rehearsed the Indians' grievances, including the delay in the issue of provisions "till our children was dieing with hunger," and mentioned the captives only enough to remind Sibley of their presence in the Indian camp. 17 No doubt Little Crow realized their utility as hostages and wished to make the best terms he could. Unfortunately for his purposes, dissension among his people was increasing day by day, and some important chiefs were only awaiting an opportunity to dissociate themselves from the war and its principal architect. On September 12, Sibley received a secret message from Wabasha and Taopi (chief of the farmer Indians) inquiring about terms of surrender. The lower bands ____________________ 17 Ibid., p. 444. -121- had by this time evacuated the area of their reservation and were congregating near the village of the upper Sioux chief Red Iron, in what is now the eastern tip of Lac qui Parle County. About the same time, the lower Sioux gave a feast which was attended by most of the men of both divisions. The advantages and disadvantages of surrender were thoroughly discussed at this council. Paul Mazakutemane, formerly head of the Hazelwood Republic and a leading Christian Indian, made a speech in which he charged the lower Indians with having started the war without consulting the upper bands, pointed out the hopeless odds facing them now, and pleaded for the surrender of the captives. In reply, Rda-in-yan-ka, Wabasha's sonin-law, delivered an oration which, if correctly reported, probably summed up the position of the more intelligent among those who favored continuing the war. The speech, as printed in the earliest history of the uprising, deserves quotation at full length: I am for continuing the war, and am opposed to the delivery of the prisoners. I have no confidence that the whites will stand by any agreement they make if we give them up. Ever since we treated with them their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. Some of our people have been shot, some hung; others placed upon floating ice and drowned; and many have been starved in their prisons. It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four returned from Acton and told what they had done. When they did this, all the young men became excited, and commenced the massacre. The older ones would have prevented it if they could, but since the treaties they have lost all their influence. We may regret what has happened but the matter has gone too far to be remedied. We have got to die. Let us, then, kill as many of the whites as possible, and let the prisoners die with us. 18 Whether because of the eloquence of his appeal or for other reasons, the decision was made to continue the war. As the council broke up, the braves rode off, singing: ____________________ 18 Isaac V. D. Heard, History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863 ( New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863), pp. 151-152. The authenticity of this speech may be questioned; Heard gives no source for it. Paul Mazakutemane provides a remotely similar version, much less eloquent, in "Narrative of Paul Mazakootemane," trans. by Rev. S. R. Riggs, Minnesota Historical Collections, III ( 1870- 1880), 82-90. Still, it is probably as accurate as most of the renditions of speeches by Indians, such as the memorable words of Logan as recorded by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. It has the flavor of the letter dictated by Rda-in-yan-ka four days before his death and translated by Riggs. -122- Over the earth I come; Over the earth I come; A soldier I come; Over the earth I am a ghost. 19 The "friendlies" were thus not in a position to seize the captives from Little Crow and make a separate peace with the whites. Sibley realized that in order to bring about such an eventuality, he would first have to inflict a decisive defeat on Little Crow's forces. In the battle of Wood Lake he did so. That battle, which involved relatively large forces on both sides, started by accident when some soldiers in search of potatoes stumbled upon Indians hidden in the grass, awaiting the moment set for attack. After about two hours of fighting, the Sioux were defeated with a loss of sixteen killed, as compared to only seven on the other side--the only major clash in which the admitted Indian losses outnumbered those of the whites. The battle of Wood Lake, fought on September 23, ended Little Crow's last hope of winning the war. Soon thereafter he and his loyal followers fled to the Dakota prairies, where they assumed, correctly, that no military force would be able to pursue them so late in the season. Their flight left the way open for those who had opposed the war or who had tired of it to deliver up the captives and make peace on such terms as they could obtain. Sibley entered the friendly camp three days after the battle and took possession of the 269 men, women, and children, both whites and half-breeds, who had been held by the Sioux since their capture early in the war. Although bitterly denounced by many Minnesotans for the extreme caution of his movements, Sibley almost certainly prevented a general slaughter of the captives by not rushing pell-mell into battle with the Sioux while Little Crow still had them in his possession. By recovering the prisoners and driving the hostile Sioux from the state, he had accomplished the two purposes of his expedition. Although Little Crow was still at large and raids conducted by small, irregular bands continued for more than two years afterward, the purely military phase of the Sioux Uprising may be said to have ended on September 27 at Camp Release. There remained the question of what to do with the twelve hundred Indians taken into custody at Camp Release and the others who drifted in or were rounded up by detachments from Sibley's force later. The way this problem was met in the weeks that followed constitutes one of ____________________ 19 "Narrative of Paul Mazakootemane," p. 85. -123-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:33:30 GMT -5
the blackest pages in the history of white injustice to the Indian. In order to understand how it could have been countenanced by men of integrity and humanity like Sibley, one must attempt to comprehend the frame of mind in which the white population of Minnesota found itself during and after the uprising. Contemporary newspapers provide some indication of the popular mood. Far from the scenes of massacre, in a part of the state that could hardly have felt itself in immediate danger, a Red Wing editor wrote of the Sioux four days after the attack on the lower agency: "They must be exterminated, and now is a good time to commence doing it." 20 Closer to the scenes the same sentiment was expressed. A Mankato newspaper announced on August 30: "The cruelties perpetrated by the Sioux nation in the past two weeks demand that our Government shall treat them for all time to come as outlaws, who have forfeited all right to property and life." 21 The editor of the other Mankato newspaper told his readers that if its columns were not overflowing with news, it was because he had joined one of the volunteer companies formed "for the extermination of Indians. . . ." 22 A group of men involved in the defense of Fort Ridgely entered into a solemn compact that if they survived the attack they would not rest until they had exterminated every man, woman, and child in the Sioux nation. 23 As late as February, 1863, a Faribault newspaper published a letter that declared: "Extermination, swift, sure, and terrible is the only thing that can give the people of Minnesota satisfaction, or a sense of security." 24 No doubt the sentiment reflected in the newspapers grew largely from the atrocities reported from the war zone. But in view of the remarks made in 1857 by Special Agent Prichette about the desire of the whites to use an Indian war as a pretext for seizing lands, one is justified in wondering how much that motive figured in the hysterical utterances of the newspapers and of public men in the weeks following the out- ____________________ 20 Goodhue County Republican (Red Wing), August 22, 1862. 21 Mankato Semi-Weekly Record, August 30, 1862. 22 Mankato Independent, September 11, 1862. The editor, Clinton B. Hensley, contracted pneumonia on this "Indian hunt" and died six days before the execution of the convicted Indians. 23 Pioneer and Democrat ( St. Paul), September 4, 1862 (citing the Stillwater Messenger, September 2, 1862). 24 Central Republican ( Faribault), February 18, 1863. The writer of the letter did not favor removal of the Indians: "The settlers are too generous to send as a blightly curse, to any portion of this fair earth, those fiends [who] would pollute the foulest regions of h-ll by being colonized there!" -124- break. Although the evidence would not support the contention that the Sioux Uprising was deliberately provoked by the whites as an excuse for exterminating the Sioux or driving them out of the state and opening their lands to settlement, there were undoubtedly plenty of Minnesotans who felt, and perhaps expressed the view privately, that the cloud had a silver lining, that though the murder of hundreds of settlers was a high price to pay to be rid of the Indians, yet one could not be blind to the advantages it now offered in terms of the opportunity to satisfy the greed of those safely behind the lines. And what better way was there to mask this greed than to wave the bloody shirt and call righteously for the extermination of the "inhuman fiends" who had heretofore stood in the way of Manifest Destiny, Minnesota brand? Whatever the motives, vengeance was called for, and vengeance there had to be. Since the most clearly guilty among the Sioux were scattered over the prairies to the west, the popular demand for retribution had to be satisfied by punishing such Indians as were available. Although those who had voluntarily surrendered might reasonably be assumed to be innocent--and one of the captives who later wrote of her experiences was unable to recognize any of the murderers in that group--they were available and thus had to serve in the absence of more suitable material. According to missionary Riggs, who accompanied Sibley's expedition, as soon as the captives had been released, they began to tell of "Indian men who had maltreated these white women, or in some way had been engaged in the massacres. . . ." So the next day Sibley asked Riggs to serve as a medium of communication between the women and himself. The result was the apprehension of a few of the Indians and the organization of a military commission to examine others against whom charges might be made. This plan was innocuous enough at first, but pressure from public opinion forced a change in procedure; and in a few weeks, "instead of taking individuals for trial, against whom some specific charge could be brought, the plan was adopted to subject all grown men, with a few exceptions, to an investigation of the commission, trusting that the innocent could make their innocency appear." 25 Thus the revered Anglo-Saxon principle of law that a person is considered innocent until proved guilty was reversed in the case of Indians. Riggs, writing years afterwards, admitted that it was impossible for ____________________ 25 Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), pp. 206-207; Stephen R. Riggs to Martha Riggs, September 27, 1862, copy in Riggs Papers, Minnesota Historical Society. -125- the Indians to "make their innocency appear," particularly since participation in battles was grounds for a conviction on a charge of murder. Isaac V. D. Heard, a lawyer who served on the commission and later wrote a history of the Sioux war, justified the departure from the usual rules of war on the grounds that "the battles were not ordinary battles." Since New Ulm was defended by civilians, an attack on it was not war but murder. Besides, wrote Heard, most of these Indians must also have been engaged in individual massacres and outrages. The marauding bands "undoubtedly" consisted of the same men who made the sustained attacks on Fort Ridgely and other fortified positions, so they were not engaged in war either. Heard's clincher, however, is this example of logic as employed by white men in 1862: "The fact that they were Indians . . . would raise the moral certainty that, as soon as the first murders were committed, all the young men were impelled by the sight of blood and plunder . . . to become participants in the same class of acts." 26 If the manner in which the trials were conducted represented a departure from normal legal procedure, the method used to disarm the bulk of the Indians was a violation of common decency. The first ones arrested were handled in a straightforward fashion, but a ruse was employed to place 236 others at the mercy of their captors. Informed that their annuities were to be paid and that they must first be counted, as had been the practice in previous years, the men were sent through a doorway and there asked to give up their arms, with the promise that they would receive them back shortly. As soon as they did so, they were chained by the ankles two and two, as those arrested earlier had been. No doubt Sibley and his officers thought they were being comparatively lenient, for some of the soldiers advocated making any agreement with the Indians to obtain the captives and then murdering all the Indians--men, women, and children. 27 Sibley's intention when he began the trials was apparently to execute promptly all the men found guilty by his commission. Actually, he had no authority to take such action, nor did his superior, General John ____________________ 26 Riggs Mary and I, p. 207; Heard, History of the Sioux, pp. 255-257. 27 Heard, History of the Sioux War, p. 187. According to Big Eagle, the half-breeds who served as intermediaries between the Sioux and the military had assured him and the other men that they would be kept prisoner only a short time; he served three years in prison and narrowly escaped hanging. See Holcombe, "A Sioux Story of the War," pp. 397, 399. -126- Pope, who had been placed in command of the Military Department of the Northwest in September. As the convictions multiplied, this intention faded, and Sibley merely kept on with the trials, meanwhile awaiting orders from superior authority. The procedure was to present certain charges against each prisoner, based on information provided by the half-breeds and others who had been held captive by the Indians. According to Heard, Riggs served as a virtual "Grand Jury" in assembling this evidence; Riggs later denied this ascription of authority to him. Although the missionary shared the general feeling that most of the Indians tried were guilty, and wrote President Lincoln that the "great majority" should be executed to meet the "demands of public justice," he had serious reservations about the manner in which they were convicted. The greater part, he said, "were condemned on general principles, without any specific charges proved. . . . " 28 For his suggestion that even Indians perhaps deserved a fair trial, he was roundly condemned, as were other missionaries, including the elder Williamson. When the trials were finally concluded, on November 5, nearly four hundred Indians and half-breeds had gone through the process, which sometimes accommodated forty in a single day. Of them, 303 were judged guilty of murder and sentenced to death. One, Joseph Godfrey, a mulatto married to an Indian woman, though convicted on evidence as reliable as any offered in these trials, proved himself so useful at supplying evidence to convict his recent comrades-in-arms that his sentence was later commuted. The commissioners managed to persuade themselves that there was some doubt of his guilt, though they allowed no such doubts to intrude upon their judgment of men less pliable or less articulate. 29 The condemned Indians and a few women and children who accompanied them were removed from the camp on November 9 and marched to a hastily improvised prison just west of Mankato. As they passed through New Ulm, they were attacked by local citizens, then engaged in disinterring some of those who had been killed in the fighting late in August; fifteen prisoners and several guards were ____________________ 28 Riggs, Mary and I, p. 208; Stephen R. Riggs to President Abraham Lincoln, November 17, 1862, Riggs Papers. 29 Godfrey served three years in prison, together with the Indians, and then accompanied them upon their release to the Niobrara reservation in Nebraska, where he became known as a quiet, industrious man who seldom left his farm. He died in 1909. Niobrara (Nebr.) Tribune, July 8, 1909. -127- seriously injured by the barrage of bricks and stones with which the "Dutch she devils," as Sibley called them, bombarded the now defenseless Indians. Two days before the departure of the prisoners, the rest of the captured Sioux were sent down the river to Fort Snelling. They, too, were attacked along the way. As they passed through Henderson, they were set upon by the enraged populace with guns, knives, clubs, and stones. Several were injured, and one infant was so badly hurt that it soon died. Those who survived this assault and the following winter remained in a dismal encampment on the flats below Fort Snelling for about six months, tormented by wild rumors concerning the fate of their menfolk and perpetually in danger of being killed by parties of whites who repeatedly threatened to break through the wooden fence erected for their protection. When the trials were completed, the general assumption was that all 303 of the men condemned to death would be speedily hanged. President Lincoln, however, intervened and ordered General Pope to send him the complete trial record, which he then turned over to two men with instructions to examine each case carefully, with special reference to those who had been convicted of rape or of murdering innocent settlers. Although under conflicting pressures from humanitarians who urged leniency and from citizens of Minnesota desirous of revenge, Lincoln apparently consulted his own conscience in the matter before him and reduced the number to be executed to forty, including Godfrey, whose sentence was commuted upon recommendation of the military commission that had tried him. Lincoln's action was, of course, displeasing to the people of Minnesota, whose spokesmen, Governor Ramsey and the congressional delegation, had been insisting that the Indians must all be executed or lynch law would prevail. After an abortive attack on the condemned by a Mankato mob on December 4, Ramsey issued a proclamation calling on the people of the state to refrain from mob violence. He assured them that even if the President should see fit to interfere with the rightful course of justice by saving any of the prisoners from the halter, they would still be subject to state law, and the will of the people would prevail through legal means. 30 There was no further violence, even after Lincoln's order was made public, though the newspapers continued their attacks on the "sickly sentimentalists" who had exerted a baneful influence on the President. Nevertheless, ____________________ 30 His proclamation is in Minnesota Executive Dacuments, 1862, pp. 64-66 (extra session). -128- the prisoners were removed from Camp Lincoln on the day after the attempted assault and placed in more secure confinement in what is now downtown Mankato. After one postponement, the execution was set for December 26, across the street from where the prisoners were being held. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent an outbreak of violence. Martial law was declared for an area ten miles around, the sale of liquor was suspended, and troops were concentrated in the town to guarantee that the Indians would meet their deaths in proper legal fashion. These precautions were unnecessary; the spectacle of thirty-nine Indians to be hanged at once was a good enough show to divert the citizens from any more active sports. The condemned men were separated from their comrades four days before the execution and were offered the services of both Protestant and Catholic missionaries. All but two accepted Christian baptism. Contemporary accounts make much of their last farewells to their friends and families. As on an earlier occasion, the most eloquent words were those of Rda-in-yan-ka, who dictated the following letter to his father-in-law: WABASHAW: You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and give ourselves up to the whites, all would be well--no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded, or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day, I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. . . . My wife and children are dear to me. Let them not grieve for me. Let them remember that the brave should be prepared to meet death; and I will do so as becomes a Dacotah. 31 A last-minute change of schedule was the removal of one name from the list of those to die. The remaining thirty-eight condemned mounted the scaffold chanting their death song, reluctantly allowed the white caps to be adjusted over their heads, and then attempted to grasp each other's hands in a final gesture of solidarity. The trap was sprung by William Duley, some of whose family had been killed at Lake Shetek. His personal desire for revenge and that of the spectators was satisfied ____________________ 31 Quoted in Heard, History of the Sioux War, p. 284. The execution of the Sioux is recounted in many places, notably in Thomas Hughes, History of Blue Earth County ( Chicago: Middle West Publishing Co., [ 1901]), pp. 127-136. Comparison with contemporaneous newspaper accounts reveals several discrepancies in Hughes' account, which was evidently based largely on the recollections of John C. Wise, editor of the Mankato Semi-Weekly Record in 1862. -129- as thirty-eight Sioux corpses dangled from the scaffold. When all had been pronounced dead, the bodies were buried in a shallow grave nearby, from which they were shortly exhumed for use as cadavers by local physicians. 32 As injustice had characterized every previous stage in the treatment of the Sioux, so it also figured in the selection of the men who were to die. Among the 303 originally condemned to death there were three or four by the name of Chaskay, and two or three Washechoons. All were numbered, but since no one could remember which number was attached to which individual, Joseph R. Brown was entrusted with the job of examining the charges so as to determine which men were intended in Lincoln's order. Riggs later wrote that, although " extraordinary care" was meant to be used, when he and Brown afterward compared the men's stories and confessions, made a day or two before their death, they were forced to conclude that two mistakes had occurred. And the marshal of the prison told Bishop Henry B. Whipple that on the day after the execution, when he went to release a man who had been acquitted for saving a woman's life, he was told: "You hung him yesterday." 33 Although the Sioux still in custody, both at Mankato and at Fort Snelling, had to be disposed of, and although Little Crow was still at large, the execution that December day at Mankato brought the Sioux war to an end. It was a totally unnecessary conflict precipitated by an accident, disastrous for its white and its Indian victims alike. Did it have any redeeming features? The missionaries professed at the time to see in the mass conversion of the Indians an unlooked-for and welcome benefit, an example of good coming out of evil. Others saw in the selfless devotion of the loyal Indians and in the courage displayed by some of the white victims of the uprising evidence of heroism which compensated in part for the bestiality shown on both sides.34 Though the Sioux Uprising produced individual heroes and hero- ____________________ Besides the attacks on the prisoners at New Ulm and on their families at Henderson, white atrocities included throwing a wounded Indian into a burning building at Fort Ridgely. This "daring but somewhat cruel feat" was witnessed by Sergeant J. C. Whipple and reported to Charles S. Bryant. See Bryant and Murch, History of theGreat Massacre 32 Minnesota Pioneer, December 28, 1862; Nathaniel West, The Ancestry, Life, and Times of Hon. Henry Hastings Sibley, LL.D. ( St. Paul: Pioneer Press Publishing Co., 1889), p. 291. 33 Riggs, Mary and I, p. 211; Henry B. Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate ( New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), p. 132. The Washechoon who was executed was later discovered to have been a sixteen-year-old white boy who had been brought up among the Indians. See Hughes, History of Blue Earth County, p. 129. -130-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:34:13 GMT -5
ines, it revealed no leader of heroic stature, as some earlier Indian wars had done. Noble deeds were performed by many of the participants in the conflict. Among the whites there was the ferryman who, according to legend, kept the ferry going until all who wished to use it had crossed or until he was killed by the Indians. Among the Indians there were John Other Day, Lorenzo Lawrence, Paul Mazakutemane, Simon Anawangmani, and others, who took very real risks to help their white friends. They were praised in the newspapers and from the pulpits, and some of them received a more tangible reward through a congressional appropriation for their benefit a few years later. But no amount of praise for their courage can disguise the fact that they were the betrayers of their people. Some, like Taopi, who testified in the trials, were so hated that they dared not go to live among their people after the uprising. 35 The fashion once was to designate as heroes only the "good Indians" --those who cooperated with the whites in the despoliation of their people. The pendulum has swung the other way in recent times, and we have in such a book as Alvin M. Josephy The Patriot Chiefs a longdelayed tribute to those who refused to collaborate--not the mere troublemakers but the leaders who fought for their way of life and sometimes chose to die rather than submit. An attempt could probably be made to "rehabilitate" Little Crow and invest him with the dignity of a tragic hero. Yet, though Sibley's biographer calls him the successor to Osceola, Black Hawk, Tecumseh, and King Philip, he lacks the stature of those men. If his final gesture in leading his people in what he knew to be a hopeless cause places him in a class with the great chieftains, his earlier collaboration with the whites--sometimes, it would seem, for personal gain-- deprives him of the true heroic stature. Other than Little Crow, only one of the hostiles who fought and died ____________________ Great Massacre, p. 201. Many of the depredations which the Indians' annuities were used to pay were actually committed by white looters who roved through the abandoned country picking up what the Indians had left. 35 The conflicting stories about the ferryman are discussed in Joseph Connors, "The Elusive Hero of Redwood Ferry," Minnesota History, XXXIV ( June 1955), 233-238. The Pioneer and Democrat for August 27, 1862, mentions that Other Day was currently quite a "lion" in St. Paul, where he addressed an audience at Ingersoll's Hall and where the familiar portrait of him was made by the photographer Joel E. Whitney. Taopi's testimony and that of his mother may have resulted in some convictions, but it brought no tangible rewards from the government. He died in extreme poverty in 1869. See the Central Republican, March 3, 1869, and the Faribault Repulican, October 18, 1871, and also William Welsh, comp., Taopi and His Friends, or the Indians' Wrongs and Rights ( Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Heffelfinger, 1869), pp. 53-54. -131- in 1862, Rda-in-yan-ka, emerges as a candidate for the position of tragic hero. Fully knowing of the duplicity of white men and aware, at least by mid-September, of the futility of the war he was fighting, he deliberately chose death in preference to surrender. If there is in his final message to his father-in-law a note of petulance, there is also a stronger note of defiance, the defiance of one who is not afraid to die but who wants the reasons for his death and the manner of his death known and remembered by his own people and perhaps by his enemies. One would like to learn more about Rda-in-yan-ka. As it is, about all we know, besides the text of his two known utterances, is the sketchy information provided by the court record. He was accused, on the testimony of David Faribault, of being active in nearly all the battles and of functioning as a kind of exhorter to his fellows. In his defense he said only that he had gone to Little Crow and tried to stop the killings when he learned of them on August 18. He did not deny the charge, brought by Paul Mazakutemane and Lorenzo Lawrence, that he opposed surrendering the captives, and he "supposed that he was to be hung for that." 36 He was probably right in this supposition, for he was not accused of any of the classes of crimes specified in Lincoln's order. Whatever the end of the Sioux Uprising may have meant to the white man--a chance to speculate in land or acquire a farm in lands previously unavailable, a demonstration of the Lord's saving power over men about to be executed, or something else--for the Sioux it meant just one thing: catastrophe. It meant their expulsion from the land where they and their ancestors had lived since the immemorial past, and, more than that, it meant the shattering of whatever unity the Santee bands had possessed. Never again were the Mdewakantons, Wahpekutes, Sissetons, and Wahpetons one people, occupying a single fairly well defined land area. Henceforth they were scattered over states and provinces, with hundreds of miles separating their dispersed settlements and the lands between rapidly filling up with white men, who learned eventually to tolerate the Indian, if only to exploit him, but never to accept him as an equal. ____________________ 36 Heard, History of the Sioux War, pp. 281-282. Heard reports (p. 292) one other grim tradition concerning this man. At the execution he suffered the final indignity of having the rope break, so that, although probably dead, he had to be strung up a second time. Hughes assigns this ignominy to Cut Nose, the most hated of the thirtyeight. See Hughes, History of Blue Earth County, p. 134. Contemporary newspaper accounts do not name the man who fell. -132- CHAPTER 7 Exile ALTHOUGH THE execution of the men thought to be most deeply implicated in the massacres of 1862 partially satisfied the demand of the Minnesota citizens for vengeance, two more objectives remained to be realized: the Sioux had to be expelled from the state, and an effort had to be made to punish the fugitives still roaming the prairies to the west. The accomplishment of the second of these aims--to the degree that anything was accomplished--had little bearing on the Santees and can be summarized briefly. Besides Little Crow's group of diehards, most of the upper Sioux had fled before Sibley's army in September, 1862, and spent the winter in the Devils Lake area. Although most of them had not been involved in the massacres, they judged it expedient to stay out of the way of white men not disposed to make fine distinctions between guilty and innocent Indians. In the spring of 1863 a campaign was planned to kill or capture these remaining "hostiles" and incidentally to demonstrate to all the Sioux that United States troops could invade their country with impunity. The projected campaign took the form of a gigantic pincers movement involving two bodies of troops, one moving northwest from Fort Ridgely, the other advancing up the Missouri from Fort Randall to cut off the retreat of those Indians driven west by the first. Sibley, -133- now a brigadier general, commanded the first force, General Alfred Sully the second. 1 Whether the 1863 campaign was a success or a failure, from the standpoint of the whites, depends on what standards of measurement are used. On the one hand, Sibley's enemies saw it as an ineffectual waste of the taxpayers' money which not only failed to kill or capture any large number of Indians but left the Minnesota frontier comparatively unprotected and subject to isolated raids by small bands of Indians. On the other hand, the expedition did drive the main body of the Sioux west of the Missouri, at least temporarily, and destroyed enormous quantities of their supplies and equipment. Three battles were fought in July: Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Stony Lake, all in what is today east-central North Dakota. All resulted in one-sided victories for the military force, which had modern rifles and some artillery, while the Indians had to fight mostly with shotguns and bows and arrows and were chiefly concerned with protecting the retreat of their women and children. Sully's failure to move up the Missouri rapidly enough to effect a meeting with Sibley permitted the bulk of the Indians to escape west of the river. Sully did, however, achieve the biggest victory of the expedition in the battle of Whitestone Hill, fought in present-day Dickey County, North Dakota, on September 3. The Indians' casualties were heavy, and a large number of captives, mostly women and children, were taken. 2 The dissatisfaction of many Minnesotans with the campaign of 1863 grew partly out of the continued hostility of Indians closer at hand. Beginning in April and continuing through July, the settlers were plagued by a series of petty horse-stealing raids, in the course of which ____________________ 1 The campaigns of 1863 and 1864 are treated in some detail in William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, II ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1961), 265-301. The present account follows this treatment, supplemented by Robert Huhn Jones, The Civil War in the Northwest ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). Among the primary sources consulted are The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886- 1901); Board of Commissioners, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861- 1865 ( St. Paul: Pioneer Press Co., 1890, 1893); A. P. Connolly, A Thrilling Narrative of the Minnesota Massacre and the Sioux War of 1862-63 ( Chicago: A. P. Connolly, 1896); David L. Kingsbury, "Sully's Expedition Against the Sioux in 1864," Minnesota Historical Collections, VIII ( 1895- 1898), 449-456; and "Diary Kept by Lewis C. Paxson , Stockton, N.J.," North Dakota Historical Collections, II ( 1908), Part 2, 102-163. 2 The site of the battle of Whitestone Hill is in a state park today. There is an impressive shaft on the hill commemorating the soldiers who were killed there, and an inconspicious marker below honoring the Indian dead. -134- several whites were killed. Not only did the raiders reach exposed frontier settlements like those on the Watonwan River and the edge of the Big Woods in McLeod and Wright counties, but they even penetrated as far as Le Sueur, Rice, and Dakota counties, east of Mankato and St. Peter. The profound sense of insecurity engendered by these raids led the state government to resort to extreme measures to end the menace. On July 4 a volunteer force of scouts was authorized and a $25 bounty on Sioux scalps declared. Sixteen days later a reward of $75 was ordered, payable to anyone not serving with this force who could provide satisfactory proof that he had killed a Sioux warrior. In September the reward was increased to $200. 3 One of these raids resulted in the killing of Little Crow. The chief and his immediate followers had spent the winter without adequate provisions on the northern plains and had sought aid from the British authorities at Fort Garry. Although the governor of Rupert's Land refused to give them ammunition when they called on him late in May, he did relieve their starvation with an issue of provisions. 4 In June, Little Crow, his son Wowinapa, and a few followers invaded the area of McLeod and Meeker counties, where some settlers were murdered, probably by members of their band. On the evening of July 3, Nathan Lampson and his son Chauncey fired on two Indians picking raspberries in a thicket north of Hutchinson. They killed one, who was later identified as Little Crow, and the other, Wowinapa, was later captured by the military. The chief's body was thrown on a heap of entrails at a slaughter house; his scalp eventually ended up in the state historical society. Thus ignominiously perished the leader of the Uprising of 1862. 5 The less than complete success of the 1863 campaign led to the outfitting of another the following year. Again two columns, one moving up the Missouri, the other west from Minnesota, were employed. They contrived to meet on the Missouri and then headed into the comparatively unknown country to the west, where they fought a major ____________________ 3 Minnesota Executive Documents, 1863, pp. 339-349, 192, 196, 198. This source lists only four beneficiaries under the terms of these orders, three of whom received $25 each, the other $75. See ibid., pp. 223, 224, 226, 403. As Walter Trenerry pointed out in an article a century later, these orders, issued by the state adjutant general, were illegal. See Walter N. Trenerry, "The Shooting of Little Crow: Heroism or Murder?", Minnesota History, XXXVIII ( September 1962), 15 3. 4 Secretary of State William Seward to Secretary of Interior John B. Usher, July 2, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR. 5 Mankato Weekly Union, July 17, 1863; Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 281 - 285. -135- engagement with the Indians in the Killdeer Mountains and did some desultory skirmishing in the Badlands. This expedition added to the geographical knowledge of what is now western North Dakota, and it probably also contributed to the starvation of the Indians whose supplies were destroyed, but it bore little relationship to the Sioux Uprising or its perpetrators. Most of the Indians encountered were Yanktonais and Tetons, who had taken no part in the uprising and were doubtless somewhat puzzled at the gratuitous invasion of their country. From this point on, the military campaigns on the prairies lose whatever connection they had with the 1862 outbreak and merge into the long series of wars with the Sioux that ended only with the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. 6 Although the newspapers of Minnesota were calling for the expulsion of all Indians from the state, attention naturally centered early in 1863 about the Sioux who had been taken into custody at Camp Release. These people--the prisoners held at Mankato and the larger group at Fort Snelling--spent a miserable and anxious winter. The condemned men probably fared better than their families. Out of the 350 or more, only thirteen died during the winter, as against about 130 in the camp at Fort Snelling. Under the stimulus of Thomas S. Williamson, who preached to them every Sunday, and Robert Hopkins, one of their number and a Christian, the men in prison underwent a mass religious conversion. Early in February, Williamson and Gideon Pond, satisfied that the professions of faith were in most cases sincere, baptized 274 of the prisoners. Eventually nearly all were baptized. Along with this burst of religious enthusiasm came a desire to adopt other features of the white man's culture, notably the written word. According to Riggs, the prison became one great school that winter. The prisoners practiced writing on slates and with pen and paper until they were able to express themselves with sufficient fluency to write letters to their families. One contemporary account had it that by March they were turning out one or two hundred letters weekly, which Williamson faithfully carried to the camp below the fort. 7 The knowledge acquired during the winter of 1862-1863 later proved valuable to the men who were released, some of whom became leaders among their people. ____________________ 6 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 296 - 300. Further expeditions in 1865 and 1866 encountered no Indians. 7 Ibid., II, 249 - 251 ; Stephen R. Riggs, Tah-koo Wah-kan; or, the Gospel Among the Dakotas ( Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1869), pp. 342-354; Mankato Weekly Record, March 7, 1863. -136- The families of the condemned men, together with the rest of the captive Sioux, experienced a similar wave of religious enthusiasm and interest in learning. They too were under the influence of missionaries, to whom goes the credit for the transformation that swept over them. John P. Williamson, who had barely begun missionary work on the old reservation at the time of the uprising, joined them at their place of confinement and remained with them all winter, as did Samuel D. Hinman, the Episcopal missionary whose work on the reservation had likewise been cut short by the outbreak. Williamson held nightly prayer meetings in the garret of an old government warehouse large enough to seat five hundred. Although he proceeded more cautiously than his father, he did baptize at least 140. Hinman baptized 144, including all the chiefs of the lower Sioux, and soon had 300 under his care. These two men thus laid the foundations for the later strength of the Episcopal Church and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions among the Santees. Father Augustin Ravoux, who had ministered to the convicted prisoners before they were executed, baptized 184, but he did not remain in the camp and hence did not gain so lasting an influence for the Catholic Church as the other men did for their denominations. 8 The number in these two concentration camps varied somewhat throughout the winter. At the end of February there were 322 prisoners at Mankato, plus about 20 cooks, laundresses, and other service personnel--all Indians--employed by the prison authorities.9 The other group contained 1,601 on December 2 and 1,591 on March 10, the 130 deaths having been nearly offset by additions captured by the military during the winter. At the time of the earlier census, the total included 295 upper Sioux, 133 Wahpekutes, and 112 half-breeds without tribal affiliation; the rest were Mdewakantons. 10 The extreme congestion, ____________________ 10 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1863, pp. 313 - 316 ; Henry H. Sibley to Usher, March 14, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR. Among the Mdewakantons, the largest band was Wacouta's, with 221 members, followed by Taopi's with 214, Traveling Hail's with 193, Wabasha's with 165, Eagle Head's with 109, Good Road's with 98, and Black Dog's with 61. Taopi was chief of the "farmer Indians," a band made up of men from several of the traditional villages. Since he was originally from Kapozha, however, he may be considered the legitimate successor to the chief of that village, Little Crow. Traveling Hail was chief of the old Lake Calhoun band, and Eagle Head led an offshoot of the Shakopee band, most of whose members had taken flight with their chief as the uprising came to a close. Mankato, chief of the Good Road band, had 8 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 252-254; Riggs, Tah-koo Wah-kan, pp. 355-361. 9 Mankato Weekly Record, March 7, 1863. -137- which encouraged the spread of measles and other diseases, together with exposure to cold, accounted for most of the deaths, which were heaviest among the children. Except for the cramped quarters, the Indians' physical circumstances were probably little worse than they would have been in a normal winter on the reservation. Anxiety over their fate added to the hardship of this dismal winter and created a psychological state only partly alleviated by the religious consolation afforded by their acceptance of Christianity. The missionaries who devoted themselves to the welfare of the Indians were handicapped in their work by the continued vindictiveness of the surrounding white populace. The calumny directed indiscriminately at all Indians naturally fell to some extent on those whites who did not share the majority view. Hinman was attacked physically by a party of roughs who broke into the stockade and beat him unconscious. Riggs, the elder Williamson, and others who defended the Indians publicly were denounced as "avaricious priests" who, like other dogs, had had their day. 11 When it was rumored that these men had interceded with the President and urged him to stay the execution of some of the condemned prisoners, they were denounced as mawkish sentimentalists or, by the more extreme, as "contemptible fools" and "cold hearted scoundrels." 12 Even Bishop Henry B. Whipple, perhaps the most respected churchman in the state, came in for his share of obloquy for his role--an important one--in preventing this legalized murder. In 1859, at the age of thirty-seven, he had been consecrated Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. Almost at once he began interesting himself in the welfare of the Indians. Besides opening a mission at the lower agency in 1860, he had begun work among the Chippewas. Several months before the uprising he had written to President Lincoln attacking the government's Indian policy, and that fall he had gone to Washington and appealed in person for clemency in the matter of the condemned prisoners. For the latter action and for his frequent and public calls for moderation he was roundly condemned by a large segment of the population. 13 ____________________ been killed at Wood Lake, and Big Eagle, chief of the Black Dog band, was one of the condemned men held at Mankato. 11 Henry B. Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate ( New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), p. 133; Central Republican ( Faribault), February 18, 1863. 12 Central Republican, May 13, 1863. 13 Bishop Whipple's service in the cause of the Indian reform movement had only begun at this time. In the next twenty-five years he was to interest himself in virtually every phase of the movement and to become a powerful influence on government -138- After several letters from him had appeared in the newspapers, someone purporting to speak for "many citizens" asked publicly, "Has'nt [sic] Bishop Whipple, relative to the condemned Indians in this State, nearly written himself into the ground?" In his autobiography he tells that at one time he was warned that some frontiersmen had been overheard saying that they "must go down to Faribault and clean out that bishop." And he said that after he had issued the sacrament of confirmation to some of the captives at Fort Snelling, a newspaper account was headlined "Awful Sacrilege--Holiest Rites of the Church Given to Red-handed Murderers." 14 The most stridently and ferociously antiIndian newspaper in the state was the Central Republican of Faribault, the Episcopal seat and Bishop Whipple's residence. Referring to another visit of the bishop to the camp, it commented: "God was mocked and his religion burlesqued by the solemn farce of administering the sacred ordinances of baptism and confirmation to a horde of the treacherous fiends at Fort Snelling not long since." 15 The ferocity of the sentiments expressed by contemporary newspapers was aggravated by political considerations, each party trying to outdo the other in catering to what it believed to be the popular mood. At a time when the motto was "Extermination or Removal!"--the former preferred--it was impossible for any political figure or party organ to remain neutral or even to approach neutrality. Hence the savagery of public statements by Governor Ramsey and the congressional delegation from Minnesota is attributable in part at least to their feeling that it would have been political suicide to urge restraint and sweet reasonableness where the Indian question was concerned. Under such pressure from their constituents and their political opponents, both the Minnesota legislature and the congressional delegation moved rapidly to bring about the expulsion of the Sioux from the state. As early as Governor Ramsey's special message to the legislature policy as the spokesman for the humanitarian groups that were seeking to recast that policy along new lines. ____________________ 14 St. Paul Pioneer, December 6, 1862; Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate, pp. 136, 160. The editor of the Pioneer, comparatively moderate on the Indian question, said that Whipple deserved a respectful hearing, even if his views were unpopular. 15 Central Republican, June 10, 1863. The editor of this newspaper was Orville Brown, known among his many enemies as "Awful Brown," who later bought the Mankato Record, transformed it into a Republican organ, and served several years as postmaster of Mankato. Born in 1810 in New York, he died in 1901, doubtless still regretting that all the Sioux had not been exterminated. -139-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:35:01 GMT -5
on September 9, 1862, the idea was broached of abrogating all treaties with the Sioux and reimbursing victims of the uprising from the annuities still due under the treaties. His proposal at that time was to ask that two million dollars be applied to this purpose, but the bill introduced in Congress by Representative Cyrus Aldrich on December 2 reduced the sum to $1,500,000. Although this amount was further reduced in the Senate, the notion expressed in Ramsey's message was accepted in principle by both houses. More important to most white Minnesotans was the expulsion of the Sioux. On December 16, Senator Morton S. Wilkinson introduced a bill calling for their removal, together with one providing for the removal of the Winnebagos. 16 After some weeks in the congressional hopper, the desired legislation was finally obtained, in the form of two acts, the first approved February 16, the second March 3, 1863. The first of these was titled "An Act for the Relief of Persons for Damages sustained by Reason of Depredations and Injuries by certain Bands of Sioux Indians" and concerned chiefly the mechanics of paying the victims of depredations. The first section, however, specifically abrogated all treaties entered into by the government with the four bands of Santee Sioux and denied them any further benefits under the terms of these treaties, including all rights to occupancy of lands in the state of Minnesota. 17 The second piece of legislation, titled "An Act for the Removal of the Sisseton, Wahpaton, Medwakanton, and Wahpakoota Bands of Sioux or Dakota Indians, and for the disposition of their Lands in Minnesota and Dakota," was the necessary sequel to the first, which had left the dispossessed bands without a place to live. The act of March 3 did not specifically designate a future home for them, but it did call upon the President to assign to them a tract of land, outside the limits of any state, large enough to provide each member of the tribe willing to farm with "eighty acres of good agricultural lands, the same to be well adapted to agricultural purposes." It further provided that the proceeds from the sale of their former reservation should be invested for their benefit. None of the money was to be paid directly to the Indians, as under the old system, but it was to be used to advance them in farming so that they would become self-sustaining. On the same date Congress approved an appro- ____________________ 16 Minnesota Executive Documents, 1862, p. 11 (extra session); Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 246; Minnesota Pioneer, January 6 and 15, 1863; Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., pp. 100, 104. 17 U. S. Statutes at Large, XII, 652-654, 819-820. -140- priation of $50,016.66 for the removal of the Sioux and their establishment in their new homes. 18 These two pieces of legislation constituted something of an innovation in United States Indian policy. Heretofore it had been the practice always to employ the treaty-making power in altering the relationship between the government and an Indian tribe; even though the tribe had been defeated in war and the pretext of a treaty between sovereign entities was patently absurd, the hoary farce was enacted. Now a precedent had been set for unilateral abrogation of treaties and the management of Indian affairs by Congress, without even the illusion of the Indians' consent. If there seemed to be some justification for this action in the case of the Sioux, there was none for the bill, approved February 21, calling for the "peaceful" removal of the Winnebagos, who had not, as a tribe, taken any part in the uprising. 19 In a sense, these acts anticipated the abandonment, seven years later, of the whole practice of negotiating treaties with Indian tribes. Since the act of March 3, 1863, did not specify where the Indians' new home would be, this became the topic of considerable discussion. Various theories had been advanced in the months since the uprising as to what should be done with the Indians. The advocates of outright extermination, though noisy, were not numerous among people whose opinion carried much weight in the determination of policy. Even Galbraith, who confessed to "feelings of exasperation against these savages" and who was emotionally involved by the need for self-justification, conceded in his official report that "few will contend that the Sioux and all other Indians can be 'exterminated' just now." 20 Galbraith's suggestion for a reservation was a reasonable one. He proposed placing the Santees on a tract of land at the northern end of the Coteau des Prairies, an area partly included in the later Sisseton Reservation in northeastern South Dakota and southeastern North Dakota. The rest of his proposal was not so reasonable. He wanted to surround the Indians with a military guard to keep them from all but ____________________ 18 Ibid., XII, 819-820, 784. This sum was one third that heretofore stipulated to be paid under the terms of the various treaties. A supplementary appropriation of $137,293.40 was made June 25, 1864, for deficiencies in the subsistence and removal expenses of both Sioux and Winnebagos. See ibid., XII I, 172. 19 Ibid., XII, 658-660. 20 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1863, pp. 294, 296. Galbraith report, pp. 266-298, is one of the major primary sources of information on the Sioux Uprising. -141- authorized contacts with white men and put them to work in a fashion not easily distinguished from slavery. His personal vindictiveness emerges clearly from his recommendation: The power of the government must be brought to bear upon them; they must be whipped, coerced into obedience. After this is accomplished, few will be left to put upon a reservation; many will be killed; more must perish from famine and exposure, and the more desperate will flee and seek refuge on the plains or in the mountains. . . . A very small reservation should suffice for them. 21 Sibley offered a somewhat similar proposal, with the exception that the reservation he proposed would have been around Devils Lake. He, too, wanted the Indians surrounded by a military cordon and reduced to beneficent servitude. One suggestion, which apparently received serious consideration for a time, was to send the convicted men to the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida coast, there to live out their lives. Surely the wildest proposal was that of James W. Taylor, who wanted to send all the Minnesota Indians--Sioux, Winnebagos, and Chippewas, numbering some 47,000--to Isle Royale in Lake Superior, to survive or starve as they could. 22 Whatever the merits of these various suggestions, none of them was adopted. Instead, Secretary of Interior Caleb B. Smith recommended to Congress in December that the Santee Sioux be placed on the Missouri River and drafted a bill to this effect. The site for their new home was later narrowed down to a point within a hundred miles of Fort Randall. Because the country below that post was beginning to fill up with white settlers, this instruction effectually limited the choice to some point above the fort--not too far above, however, for there was a supply problem to consider. The decision as to the exact site of the reservation was left to Superintendent Thompson, who received both oral and written instructions while in Washington in the spring of 1863. Thompson went exploring late in May, after the Indians had already been started on their way, and rather hastily, it would seem, decided upon a site about eight miles above the mouth of Crow Creek, some eighty miles above Fort Randall. He had been disappointed to find most of the country above the fort utterly unsuitable, devoid of timber or other resources; and knowing that the boat carrying the Indians was only a couple of days behind him, he apparently selected the first spot ____________________ 21 Ibid., 1863, p. 296 22 Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 256 - 257. -142- that seemed remotely acceptable. In his report to Commissioner Dole, made the day he arrived, he said: "I believe this is about the location the Secretary expected me to make; it is the best there is here anyway, so that I hope for your and his approval." Four days later he had almost convinced himself that it was a good place. "This is decidedly the best country above Fort Randall on the ceeded [sic] lands," he wrote the commissioner. "It has good soil, good timber and plenty of water." It was not perfect, however: "The only drawback that I fear is the dry weather. On the hills the grass is already dried up; but this is said to be an unusual season." 23 The three seasons the Santees spent at Crow Creek all proved to be "unusual," but Thompson kept right on justifying his desperate choice of a reservation in the face of irrefutable evidence that he had made a disastrous error. The first Sioux to leave Minnesota upon the opening of navigation in the spring of 1863 were the prisoners at Mankato. In order to forestall any possible violence by local mobs, plans for their removal were kept more or less secret until almost the last minute. There had been rumors that they were to be removed, but nothing definite was known until the Favorite docked at Mankato on the evening of April 21. The next morning four companies of infantry were on guard duty, in lines across the street in front of the prison. About 15 or 20 women went first, followed by 48 men who had been acquitted of formal charges but had been kept in confinement for no better reason than that they had been caught in bad company. These men were dropped off at Fort Snelling and joined their tribesmen who had spent the winter there. The 278 remaining prisoners came next, chained in pairs (3 who were ill were carried on blankets by their companions), and finally a company of troops who were to accompany them. Although there were many spectators, there was no disorder. The Mankato Weekly Record commented: "All believe they richly deserve hanging," but since this was not the President's will, "the next best thing was to take them away." 24 Many whites still refused to credit the story that these men had undergone a religious conversion and treated this report with ridicule. Commenting on a prayermeeting said to have been held on board the Favorite, the Central Republican thought it would have been fine if the boiler had exploded: ____________________ 23 Commissioner William P. Dole to Clark W. Thompson, April 8 and 9, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LS; Thompson to Dole, May 28 and June 1, 1863 (in Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1863, pp. 310-311, 316). 24 Mankato Weekly Record, April 25, 1863; Minnesota Pioneer, April 24, 1863. -143- What a glorious termination of Father Riggs' life-long Christian labors among the heathen it would have been if in the midst of that prayer season [sic] on the Favorite an explosion had occurred, which would have landed our land-lubber soldiers in some muddy marsh . . . while Father Riggs, with his pet lambs cleansed from all their sins in the blood of the innocents they slaughtered last Fall, purified through the gospel of [John] Beeson, and sanctified by faith in Riggs--went home to glory! 25 On the day before their departure Bishop Whipple wrote the Secretary of the Interior inquiring about the fate of the prisoners. Mentioning trials conducted in the heat of anger and errors made then and later, he suggested that perhaps they deserved a better fate than being sent to prison, far from their families. He thought some sort of reform school would be preferable, where they could learn to read and to practice trades that would be useful to them on their release. 26 These recommendations may have been given some attention, but they do not seem to have altered the immediate plans of the government, which were to confine the men at Camp McClellan, an army barracks near Davenport, Iowa, erected at the beginning of the Civil War for the reception of recruits. Except for some nineteen, who had been sentenced to specific prison terms, they were to be held here indefinitely, or until other plans for their disposition were decided upon. 27 The part of Camp McClellan in which the Indians were confined consisted of four barracks, one of which was used as a hospital and as quarters for the women and children who had accompanied the men. The camp, located on a high elevation, covered an area two or three hundred feet square and was enclosed by a board fence fifteen feet high. The barracks were of a temporary sort and afforded little shelter in the winter. Since the fuel the prisoners were allowed usually lasted only half a day in the coldest part of the winter, they spent their afternoons shivering in their worn blankets. Many developed tuberculosis and other diseases, and about 120 died during the three years they spent there. In the summer this "prison" was not a bad place. The inmates were permitted a good deal of freedom. They could work on nearby farms or go into town and trade mussel-shell rings, bows and arrows, and other products of their labor, all without a guard. No attempt at escape was ever made, although one is said to have been contemplated ____________________ 25 Central Republican, May 6, 1863. 26 Henry B. Whipple to Usher, April 21, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR. 27 Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), p. 220; Mankato Weekly Record, May 9, 1863. -144- at one time. The interest in religion and education which had begun at Mankato continued here. Some of the money earned by trade went for books, which were thus in good supply among the prisoners. The elder Williamson had charge of the prisoners for the first two years and ministered to their needs diligently. Early in his stay with them, he ran into difficulty and was for a time excluded from the prison on the grounds that they were "such abominable villains, incarnate devils, guilty of murder, rape and countless other atrocities, that it was wrong to show them any kind of sympathy even so far as to preach the gospel to them." But later the ban was lifted, after Williamson protested that it constituted a violation of religious freedom. The Indians divided themselves into bands, according to their old village allegiances, each under a hoonkayape, or elder, and carried on their religious activities in this fashion. 28 Meanwhile, the main body of the Sioux at Fort Snelling were shipped out early in May, also by steamboat. Although an overland route would have been much shorter, Sibley had written Secretary of Interior Usher in March recommending shipment by water as cheaper and safer and pointing out that to send them by land would expose them to attack by hostile whites and also provide too many opportunities for escape. 29 While Superintendent Thompson was in St. Louis arranging for the transportation and subsistence of the Indians and buying farm implements and other necessary items, the actual removal was entrusted to his brother, Benjamin Thompson. On May 4 the first installment, made up mostly of women and children, boarded the Davenport and started on their way down the Mississippi. The boat, 35 feet wide and 205 feet long, carried 771 Indians and a military escort of 40 men. In such fashion did the contractor, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company, fulfill the terms of the contract that called for "ample space for comfort, health, and safety" of the Indians. The next day the Northerner, pulling three barges and hence less crowded, departed with 547 Indians aboard. 30 Thompson's contract contained a provision that the passengers might ____________________ 28 Minnesota Pioneer, April 29, 1863; Mankato Weekly Record, May 9, 1863; Riggs, Mary and I, pp. 221-223; Riggs, Tah-koo Wah-kan, pp. 369-374; Thomas S. Williamson to Dole, July 25, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR; Thomas S. Williamson to Stephen R. Riggs, May 9, 1863, August 18, 1863, and September 11, 1863, Riggs Papers. Williamson's first letter to Riggs cited here contains a detailed description of the prison camp. 29 Sibley to Usher, March 14, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR. 30 William E. Lass, "The Removal from Minnesota of the Sioux and Winnebago Indians," Minnesota History, XXXVIII ( December 1963), 355-359; Minnesota Pioneer, May 5 and 6, 1863. -145- be transported by rail from Hannibal to St. Joseph. This was done with the second shipment. The Indians, accompanied by the younger Williamson, were jammed into freight cars, 60 to a car, for the trip across Missouri two days after their arrival at Hannibal on May 9. The first party, which included Hinman, went by boat all the way, transferring at St. Louis to the Florence for the slow ascent of the Missouri. At St. Joseph the two groups were reunited and completed the trip in incredible congestion. Williamson wrote his mother from St. Joseph that if all 1,300 were crowded onto one boat, it would be "nearly as bad as the Middle Passage for slaves." 31 He later described conditions on board the Florence, saying that when 1300 Indians were crowded like slaves on the boiler and hurricane decks of a single boat, and fed on musty hardtack and briny pork, which they had not half a chance to cook, diseases were bred which made fearful havoc during the hot months, and the 1300 souls that were landed at Crow Creek June 1, 1863, decreased to one thousand. . . . So were the hills soon covered with graves. The very memory of Crow Creek became horrible to the Santees, who still hush their voices at the mention of the name. 32 They had good reason to recall Crow Creek in after years with feelings of horror. The site chosen for their new home was as unsuitable as anything their nightmares might have conjured up in the months they remained at Fort Snelling anxiously awaiting the government's decision. Historian Heard, writing with evident relish, described it as "a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death." 33 If it was not quite that bad, it was certainly not a country "well adapted to agricultural purposes," as called for by the removal act. After a year's residence there, the agent described it in his annual report for 1864 as a droughtstricken desolation, a land with no lakes, almost no timber--"the whole country being one wilderness of dry prairie for hundreds of miles around." 34 The hope that the Indians might support themselves was ____________________ 31 John P. Williamson to Mrs. Thomas S. Williamson, May 13, 1863 (in Frances H. Relf , ed., "Removal of the Sioux Indians from Minnesota," Minnesota History Bulletin, II [ May 1918], 422-423). 32 Quoted in Riggs, Mary and I, p. 224. 33 Isaac V. D. Heard, History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863 ( New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863), p. 295. 34 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1864, p. 411. -146- obviously incapable of fulfillment the first year because they had arrived too late and inadequate preparations had been made for them. Besides that, the region, never subject to heavy rainfall, was passing through a cycle of extreme drought in the 1860's, and "literally nothing" was harvested in 1863 and 1864. Furthermore, there was not much game in the area, and the Indians were forbidden to leave the reservation and hunt on the prairies, though a party accompanied by Williamson did go out during the first winter and brought back enough meat to save the colony from starvation. 35 Since the Indians could not support themselves at Crow Creek, the only way to save them from starvation was for the government to supply them with their necessities. This proved difficult because of the distance from all sources of supply, the brief period of navigability on the Missouri (and it was unusually low during the drought), the loss of cattle on the hoof in transit, and the exorbitant prices charged by suppliers. To prevent the scandal that would have resulted if the Indians had all starved, Thompson contracted for a quantity of pork and flour, together with three hundred head of beef cattle, to be shipped overland from Mankato in the late fall of 1863. This "Moscow expedition," as the newspapers called it, may have saved the Santees from extinction, but the pork and flour shipped to them had been condemned as unfit for consumption by soldiers, and the beef cattle became emaciated during their 292-mile trip to the reservation. The meat and flour, with appropriate quantities of water, were dumped together into wooden tanks made of fresh cottonwood logs, and the "rotten stuff" was ladeled out to the squaws. 36 The condition of the Indians at Crow Creek was relieved only temporarily and in indifferent fashion by the "Moscow expedition" of 1863 and its successor in 1864. It remained desperate during the entire period they were exiled there. The meager sum of $100,000 appropriated annually by Congress was insufficient to provide adequately for the Indians' needs. The three hundred deaths that occurred during the first ____________________ 35 Ibid., 1864, p. 410 ; Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 260-261; J. P. Williamson to Riggs, March 2, 1864, Riggs Papers. The younger Williamson wrote to Riggs that there was not even enough grass for prairie fires. He also remarked that on Isle Royale the Indians could at least have caught fish. See J. P. Williamson to Riggs, June 9 and July 22, 1863, Riggs Papers. 36 T. S. Williamson, et al., to Dole and Usher, September 8, 1864 (in Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1864, p. 421); Folwell, History of Minnesota, II, 439-441; J. P. Williamson to Riggs, December 26, 1863, and January 16, 1864 (dated 1863), Riggs Papers. -147- few months were due largely, said the missionaries, to the lack of suitable food and clothing. As late as 1865 the absence of a physician or any medicines made it impossible to treat the great amount of illness aggravated by exposure and malnutrition. 37 As an illustration of the extremities to which the Indians were reduced, one of the soldiers who accompanied the first relief expedition reported on his return to Mankato that the squaws were picking half-digested kernels of grain out of horse manure and boiling them up for soup. Bishop Whipple repeated this story in numerous letters to government officials and also asserted that many previously respectable women had turned to prostitution as the only means of keeping themselves and their children alive. So desperate did the exiles become that some fled across the prairies in midwinter and arrived, half-starved and nearly frozen, at Faribault, having eaten nothing but roots dug from the frozen ground along the way. 38 The Winnebagos, whose number included a higher proportion of men, started leaving the reservation almost as soon as they arrived, most of them going to the Omaha reservation. Eventually, in 1865, the fait accompli of their flight was recognized by the government, and a treaty was made with the Omahas granting the Winnebagos part of their reservation. 39 ____________________ 37 T. S. Williamson, et al., to Dole and Usher, September 8, 1864 (in Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1864, p. 421); U.S. Statutes at Large, XIII, 180, 550, 559; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1865, pp. 1 89), 221. The amount appropriated in 1864 and 1865 was $100,000 each year, supplemented in the latter year by $54,711.83 for the Santees, the Winnebagos, and the Yanktons, to replace goods lost by the burning of the Welcome at St. Louis on July 15, 1864. The second "Moscow expedition" is discussed in the Mankato Weekly Record, November 26, 1864. For a complete account of these expeditions, see William E. Lass, "The 'Moscow Expedition,'" Minnesota History, XXXIX (Summer 1965), 227-240. 38 Mankato Weekly Record, January 16, 1864; Whipple to Secretary of Interior James Harlan, June 1, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Faribault Democrat, March 31, 1876 (quoting a letter from Whipple to New York Times, March 3, 1876). The letter to the Weekly Record from "One Who Has Been There" said of conditions at Crow Creek: "The condemned and rotten pork which was sold at the old Agency in this county [ Winnebago Agency] last fall for $1.25 per hundred, was carted across the country with us, and is now being retailed to the Indians by the traders at 25 cents per pound." The soldiers were said to have tried to burn the pork in their stoves, "but the stench was so awful that they could not remain in their tents." 39 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1863, pp. 321-323; George B. Graff to Dole, March 27, 1864; O. H. Irish to Dole, March 28, 1864; John A. Burbank to H. B. Branch, December 23, 1863; Burbank to Dole, January 11 and October 19, 1864; Robert W. Furnas to William M. Albin, September 28, 1864, NARS, RG 75, LR, -148-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:36:25 GMT -5
The blame for keeping the Santees at Crow Creek rests partly with Superintendent Thompson, who refused to admit that he had made a mistake, partly on the preoccupation of the country with the Civil War, and partly on a failure of communication between the agent at Crow Creek and his superiors in Washington. Although Galbraith put in a brief appearance at the reservation, he was speedily assigned to work with the commission evaluating depredations claims, and the Winnebago agent, St. A. D. Balcombe, was placed in charge of the Santees. 40 Whatever Balcombe may have thought of Crow Creek, he does not seem to have exerted himself at first to have the Indians moved. Even when Indian Bureau officials requested his opinion on the suitability of the reservation, he apparently neglected to reply until prodded again and again. When he did write, no attention was paid to what he said. Once the commissioner refused to approve an additional expenditure for provisions on the ground that the Indians should sustain themselves partly by hunting. Yet Balcombe had earlier informed him that they had been disarmed and that the military commanders refused to let them hunt off the reservation. 41 Miserable as conditions at Crow Creek were, some effort was made to re-establish the institutions of the old reservation. As soon as Thompson had arrived, late in May, he had set about erecting temporary buildings, surveying the reservation, and plowing the ground on which it was hoped a crop might be raised. Since the Sioux and the Winnebagos were to be given adjoining reservations, he thought it advisable to locate the agency on the line between them so that it could serve both. A stockade four hundred feet square was constructed for the protection of ____________________ Winnebago Agency; Mankato Weekly Record, March 19, June 4, and September 3, 1864; Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 872-874. 40 Dole to Thomspon, May 30, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LS; Thompson to Galbraith, June 23, 1863; Thompson to Dole, June 24, 1863; Thompson to St. A. D. Balcombe, December 18, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency; Dole to Balcombe, February 8, 1864, NARS, RG 75, LS. John Williamson wrote Riggs: "I think that Supt Thompson will bring every influence to build up this Agency and as long as this Administration lasts will succeed." Thompson, he thought, was involved in a scheme to divert trade to the upper Missouri via Mankato by building a line of forts of which that at Crow Creek was one. See J. P. Williamson to Riggs, December 26, 1963, Riggs Papers. 41 Acting Commissioner Charles E. Mix to Balcombe, August 12, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LS; Thompson to Balcombe, December 18, 1863, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency. -149- the agency buildings and personnel. A sawmill was set up to prepare the cottonwood and other timber for use in the buildings, and roads were cut so that the cattle could be brought to the river for watering. Except for the plowing, which was wasted effort, these undertakings produced quite a satisfactory agency plant by the end of the summer. 42 The stockade and the small contingent of troops stationed there were insufficient protection, according to Balcombe, who reported in 1864 that it had been a year "full of fears anxieties and misfortunes." The agent and the Indians alike were acutely aware that they were surrounded by hostile Sioux, who looked with contempt on both their tribesmen who had surrendered and the alien Winnebagos. Consequently both tribes "lived in fear and trembling close to the stockade, in one consolidated community" instead of scattering on farms as they were supposed to do. When a report reached the agency that even the few troops stationed there would be withdrawn, Balcombe, in a paroxysm of terror, appealed to the commissioner for two companies of soldiers, to be subject exclusively to his orders, independent of the commanding officer of the district. He insisted that if the troops left, no whites or Winnebagos would stay at the agency. Commissioner Dole called this request "strange" and refused to consider it. Shortly afterward General Sully took away the cannon and all the troops except an infantry lieutenant, twelve infantrymen, and ten cavalrymen. One of the bastions to the stockade had never been completed, and another had recently burned. The agency was obviously in no condition to defend itself against a determined attack by the western Sioux whom Sully's campaign had stirred up. 43 Balcombe's personal anxiety may account in large measure for the semihysterical quality of his reports, but he had become convinced, by the end of the second summer of drought that the Indians were right in believing that nothing could be grown at Crow Creek. Unless it was the government's plan to let them become extinct, they would have to be placed in a more satisfactory location. Thompson did not, however, share Balcombe's feelings. In his report to the commissioner accompanying that of the agent, he largely negated the effect of the latter by saying that the Sioux were well pleased with the location, and if it were not for the faultfinding of the Winnebagos and the disposition of the whites to tell them the reservation was no good, all would be well. 44 ____________________ 42 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1863, pp. 310-311, 317-318; 1864, p. 408; J. P. Williamson to Mrs. Stephen R. Riggs, September 26, [ 1863], Riggs Papers. 43 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1864, pp. 408-411, 422-423. 44 Ibid., 1864, pp. 411-412, 402. -150- The missions provided the only hopeful note in Balcombe's report for 1864. The two missionaries who had accompanied the Indians to their new home had soon made an effort to re-establish the schools they had operated in Minnesota. Williamson opened a day school early in December which ran during the following winter with an average attendance of about a hundred. Most of the scholars were large, said Williamson, adding, "Nearly all the small children died in 1863. . . ." He reported that, whereas in 1862 only 20 of these people professed Christianity, now his congregation numbered 222. Balcombe reported that 412 Sioux had withdrawn from the tribe and wanted the "religion of civilization." Intemperance was no longer a problem, even though transients passing through provided an occasional source of whiskey. 45 The condition of the Santee Sioux improved somewhat in 1865. For one thing, they escaped from the obstinacy of Thompson and the timorousness of Balcombe. As part of a general administrative reorganization in the Indian Bureau, the Northern Superintendency was transferred that spring from St. Paul to Omaha, and the Crow Creek agency was placed under the Dakota Superintendency. Newton Edmunds, governor of Dakota Territory and ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs, was a native of Michigan who had previously served as a clerk in the Surveyor General's office. His older brother, James M. Edmunds, was commissioner of the General Land Office. After his nomination to the governorship, Edmunds had taken an especially active interest in Indian affairs. Now he followed the time-honored practice of replacing the agent and other personnel at the agency with men of his own choosing. Balcombe, who had never been formally appointed agent for the Sioux, was instructed to follow the majority of the Winnebagos and locate his agency on the land purchased for them from the Omahas. Simultaneously James M. Stone was appointed agent for the " Sioux of the Mississippi," as the Santees were still officially called. 46 Stone seems to have made a favorable impression on missionary Williamson, who wrote his father that the new agent was a "quiet unassuming man" and told Riggs: "I think the Agent will treat the Ind's kindly, and make a fair distribution of what is sent them, but that the funds will all be managed by the Governor ( Edmunds) and other men ____________________ 45 Ibid., 1864, pp. 413-415. 46 Ibid., 1865, pp. 47-48 ; Dole to Thompson, March 24, 1865; Dole to Balcombe, March 25, 1865; Dole to James M. Stone, March 27, 1865; Dole to Newton Edmunds, March 27, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LS; Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 105-106. -151- not here." 47 Like most Indian agents in their first report, Stone professed to have found everything in wretched shape on his arrival. One bastion of the stockade had no roof; plastering was needed; the fences were in poor condition; the prairie sod was badly broken; only 2 cows and 17 wagons, mostly in poor condition, had been turned over to him; of 170 ox-yokes, only 30 could be made serviceable; the boiler in the sawmill was leaky; the logs turned over to him were largely rotten; the powder magazine was a damp hole seven by nine feet; and beef that had been packed in snow had spoiled when warm weather came. 48 But Stone had great faith in the future of Crow Creek. The corn crop looked good, and although the potatoes had been ravaged by grasshoppers and bugs, he felt sure that the Indians were on their way to self-sufficiency. The supply problem was improving, too. Disdaining another Moscow expedition, Governor Edmunds industriously set about supplying Crow Creek from local sources, cutting some bureaucratic corners to do so. In justification of his failure to follow official directives, he reported that the Indians said "they have never before had as good beef or as much of it." According to Edmunds, they were also well pleased with their new agent and were generally doing better. About 3,000 bushels of corn were raised that year, enough to save many from starvation. 49 All was not rosy, however, despite Edmunds' optimistic view of the situation. Many of the Indians were still living in the cloth tipis they had brought with them from Minnesota or in bark shanties, which the governor described as "totally unfitted for winter." Stone persuaded fifteen of the most industrious to build log houses, and Edmunds urged the expenditure of a thousand dollars toward the construction of more. The hundred or so able-bodied men in the group were now permitted to hunt off the reservation, but when a party tried to enter the area east of the James River, where bison were plentiful, they were turned back by scouts acting under instructions from Joseph R. Brown and had to return with but little meat. Any Sioux from west of the James were regarded as hostile, regardless of their pedigree. Major Robert H. Rose, commanding at Fort Wadsworth, wrote Stone to that effect in the sum- ____________________ 47 J. P. Williamson to T. S. Williamson, June 20, 1865, Williamson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society; J. P. Williamson to Riggs, June 21, 1865, Riggs Papers. 48 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1865, pp. 219-220. 49 Ibid., 1865, pp. 228-229 ; Edmunds to Commissioner Dennis N. Cooley, January 31, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. -152- mer of 1865, adding ominously "And I take no prisoners." Edmunds thought this threat should be sufficient grounds for removing Rose from his command, if not for dismissing him from the service, but the military were not accustomed to paying much attention to the opinions of men in the Indian Service. The Santees were unhappy about their exclusion from the area east of the James, especially since their relatives, the Sissetons, now gathered around Fort Wadsworth, were permitted to hunt there. 50 The Santee Sioux diminished steadily in number throughout the years they spent at Crow Creek, despite occasional accessions as the military rounded up fugitives during the expeditions of 1863 and 1864. Late in August, 1863, 116 prisoners were turned over to Colonel Stephen Miller at Fort Snelling, and the next winter 60 or 70 more surrendered. Most if not all of them were eventually delivered to Crow Creek, as were those who fled the reservation that winter and returned to Minnesota. Then, in 1864, some of the convicted men at Davenport were released and sent, together with a number of women and children--54 in all--to the agency. Yet when Stone took charge in June, 1865, he found only 1,043 Indians, more than 900 of them women, at Crow Creek. 51 Thus the death rate must have remained high even after the first six months, when casualties were heaviest. Unknown to the hapless Indians, events were taking place in Washington and elsewhere that were to result in their removal from Crow Creek in the spring of 1866. Brief as it was, the Crow Creek episode was an important period in the history of the Santee Sioux. Following upon the total disorganization of their society at the end of the uprising, it marked the beginning of new patterns of organization. The seven Mdewakanton bands had retained their identity, despite split-offs, during the reservation period of 1853-1862. They were still used for census purposes in the camp at Fort Snelling and seem to have formed the basis for the organization of the convicts at Camp McClellan. But the removal to Crow Creek and the three years there proved too much for the survival of these long-established tribal divisions. Early in 1866, ____________________ 50 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1865, pp. 189, 221; Stone to Cooley, October 4 and November 2, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LR. 51 C. G. Wykoff to Dole, September 24, 1863; Sibley to Thompson, May 14, 1864; Thompson to Dole, June 16, 1864, NARS, RG 75, LR; Sibley to Thompson, October 12, 1864; Thompson to Balcombe, October 14, 1864, NARS, RG 75, LR, Northern Superintendency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1865, p. 228. -153- Agent Stone reported that he had appointed a chief of a band of Santees made up of remnants of six old bands. 52 Although he probably overestimated his ability to make chiefs that the tribe would accept, his statement suggests that the old loyalties were breaking down and also that the initiative had passed from the Indians themselves to the representatives of the white man's government in Washington. As with so many other Indian tribes in the period after the Civil War, the dependence on the white man for much of their material culture was being extended to a dependence on him for their social and political organization as well. Coupled with the mass acceptance of Christianity, this meant that the Santee Sioux were losing their specifically Indian cultural identity. The rest of their story is essentially a chronicle of the process by which this loss came about and the sporadic and largely ineffectual efforts to arrest it. ____________________ 52 Stone to Edmunds, February 6, 1865, NARS, RG 75, LR. -154- CHAPTER 8 Recovery at Niobrara CROW CREEK was visited in the fall of 1865 by a peace commission consisting of Governor Edmunds, who acted as chairman; Edward B. Taylor, newly appointed Northern Superintendent; Generals Henry H. Sibley and Samuel R. Curtis; Orrin Guernsey; and the Reverend Henry W. Reed, who had been previously appointed to investigate conditions there. Their visit was brief, but in their official report they spoke "in the strongest possible terms" on the "state of semi-starvation for two years" and recommended that the Santees be moved. 1 Although several possible sites for a new home were considered, Superintendent Taylor, who seems to have been the most influential member of the commission, favored an area at the mouth of the Niobrara River in northeastern Nebraska Territory. He plugged for this location while in Washington in February, 1866, and Indian Commissioner Dennis N. Cooley, after consultation with Reed and the two generals, approved the recommendation. On February 27 an executive order was issued withdrawing from pre-emption and sale four townships in what is now Knox County. 2 ____________________ 1 Com. of Indian Affairs, Anuaal Report, 1866, p. 230. 2 Ibid., 1866, p. 223; Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 861. The establishment of the Santee Reservation is discussed in greater detail in my article "The Establishment of the Santee Reservation, 1866-1869" in Nebraska History, XLV ( March 1964), 59 - 97, of which the first part of this chapter is a summary. -155- The chief advantage of this site, as Taylor saw it, was that it had plenty of timber and at least two thousand acres of tillable land. In addition, being lower on the Missouri, it would be much easier to supply than Crow Creek. Taylor estimated that the cost of transportation could be cut in half at once, and he professed to believe that the Indians could be made self-supporting by October of 1867, after which the only cost to the government would be that of running the agency. Although a few settlers--not over half a dozen, Taylor thought--had taken claims on the land, their claims could be repurchased at a cost only slightly above the government price of public lands. 3 As soon as Taylor's plan became known, opposition developed in Dakota Territory, where commercial interests wanted to retain the patronage of the Crow Creek agency. The Yankton newspaper charged that the removal plan was a scheme concocted by Nebraska politicians for the benefit of their state, and Governor Edmunds, who seems not to have been consulted in the choice of a new location, argued that, given another year, Agent Stone could raise an abundance of food at Crow Creek, where the soil was just as good as at Niobrara and where the government had erected several thousand dollars' worth of buildings. 4 Nothing came of Edmunds' pleas, made early in April, for by that time plans for the removal of the Indians were well under way. The first to go to the new reservation were the prisoners at Davenport. The number of fugitives captured by the military since 1863 almost equaled the 120 deaths in the prison, so that by 1866 there were still, 177 prisoners and 70 women and children. After the pardoning of 30 or 40 in 1864, Thomas S. Williamson and others had worked actively for the release of the rest. Commissioner Cooley was kindly disposed toward them, saying in his report for 1865: "The only offence of which many of them appear to have been guilty is that of being Sioux Indians, and of having, when a part of their people committed the terrible outrages in Minnesota, taken part with them so far as to fly when pursued by the troops," and indicating that plans were under consideration for their release. 5 The stage was thus set for their removal to Nebraska. Upon the rec- ____________________ 3 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, pp. 223-224; Edward B. Taylor to Commissioner Dennis N. Cooley, April 6, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. 4 Union and Dakotaian (Yankton), May 26, 1866; Governor Newton Edmunds to Cooley, March 17 and April 6, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR. 5 Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), pp. 220-223; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1865, p. 27; George E. H. Day to Stephen R. Riggs, October 27, 1865, Riggs Papers. -156- ommendation of General Alfred Sully, commanding the Department of Iowa, and General John Pope, the War Department agreed to turn the prisoners and their families over to the Indian Bureau. After some confusion caused by conflicting orders as to whether the War Department or the Interior Department was to furnish transportation and the failure of the agent assigned to receive and accompany them to appear before their departure from Davenport, the 247 Indians were finally placed on board the steamboat Pembina on April 10 for the trip to St. Louis, where they were transferred to the Dora and sent up the Missouri. 6 The trip was tedious and uneventful. The Indians took in the sights of St. Louis during their stop there, and one is said to have boasted of killing and scalping a dozen white women during the uprising. For the most part, however, they spent their time making pipes and other articles for sale along the way. They held twice-weekly religious services and devoted much time to reading books in Dakota. 7 After their arrival at the Niobrara about the middle of May, the Dora went on up the river with supplies for Fort Rice. It had been expected to bring down the Crow Creek people on its return trip, but hitches developed, and the Indians and their property had to be transported by land. The failure of the Dora to bring a hundred sacks of flour, as it had been expected to do, left the people at Crow Creek in a difficult plight. With supplies on hand for only ten days, Reed, serving as special agent, decided to send the old and infirm in wagons with some provisions, in hopes of reaching Fort Randall before their supplies were exhausted. They were sent on their way May 28, and the rest of the population went on foot or horseback, reaching Niobrara on June 11. 8 The whole operation had been rather badly managed, through the fault of no one in particular, but the reunion of the former prisoners with their families compensated for much of the inconvenience. ____________________ 6 General Alfred Sully to John P. Sherburne, Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Missouri, December 29, 1865; Secretary of Interior James Harlan to Secretary of War E. M. Stanton, January 13, 1866; E. Schriver, Inspector General, to Harlan, January 30, 1866; Cooley to Harlan, March 26, 1866; Harlan to Cooley, March 27, 1866; General John Pope to Harlan, March 29, 1866; Jedediah Brown to Harlan, April 14, 1866; E. Kilpatrick to Cooley, May 3, 1866; Kilpatrick to Harlan, April 10 and 14, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, pp. 233-234. 7 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 234; St. Louis Democrat, April 14, 1866 (cited in Mankato Weekly Record, April 28, 1866). 8 Kilpatrick to Harlan, April 14, 1866; E. B. Taylor to Cooley, May 3, 1866; Henry W. Reed to Cooley, May 25, 1866; J. Brown to Harlan, June 18, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 232. -157- Preparations for their arrival had been under way for some time. Before the prisoners had arrived, Taylor had requisitioned a large hotel building at the Niobrara townsite and had bought two small buildings for storehouses. When the first Indians arrived, they were set to work planting corn and potatoes on some land already broken by one of the white settlers in the vicinity. The first site of the agency was at the townsite, about a mile east of the present town of Niobrara. There the Indians lived in tents, and the missionaries, their families, and other white people occupied the hotel. Very few improvements were made here, and those of a temporary nature. Because of lack of wood and also because of complaints from settlers that the Indians were committing minor depredations, they were removed that fall to winter quarters near the mouth of Bazile Creek, three or four miles down the Missouri from the townsite. The agency was re-established there, and various buildings, including warehouses, sleeping quarters for the employees, an agency office, a blacksmith shop, and an interpreter's house, were erected before cold weather set in. All the buildings were one-story, sodroofed affairs of logs, intended for only temporary occupancy. The missionaries built their own houses, of the same materials and much the same construction. 9 The tentativeness of these successive locations cannot have failed to impress the Indians with the uncertainty of their tenure in this new home. Although the amount of land withheld from entry and sale had been nearly doubled by a second executive order on July 20, the lands cannot be spoken of as a reservation in the customary sense of a permanent home guaranteed to the Indians by treaty with the United States government. Secretary Harlan's letter requesting the original withdrawal of four townships from the market stipulated that the withdrawal should be only temporary, "until the action of Congress be had, with a view to the setting apart of these townships as a reservation for the Santee Sioux Indians. . . ." 10 And until such action should be taken, there was nothing to prevent the government from moving the Indians anywhere it pleased. ____________________ 10 Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I, 8 61)-8 62). 9 E. B. Taylor to Cooley, May 3, 1866; Hampton B. Denman to Commissioner Lewis V. Bogy, January 8, 1867; E. B. Taylor to Cooley, October 20, 1866, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 243; Riggs, Mary and I, p. 232; Winifred W. Barton, John P. Williamson, a Brother to the Sioux ( Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1919), p. 109; John P. Williamson to Thomas S. Williamson, September 17, 1866, and to Mrs. Thomas S. Williamson, November 3, 1866, Williamson Papers; John P. Williamson to Stephen R. Riggs, November 12, 1866, Riggs Papers. -158-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:37:33 GMT -5
The uncertainty of the Indians' position, coupled with their own dissatisfaction, provided an opportunity for the Dakota politicians to work for their removal. Even before they arrived at Niobrara, a storm of protest went up from the white settlers on the opposite side of the Missouri. Although the complaints stressed the danger to the white population from "these hell hounds of Minnesota notoriety," as territorial delegate Walter A. Burleigh called them, the real motives seem to have been a desire to regain the patronage of the agency. When the Dakota politicians proposed a new home for the Santee Sioux, they suggested not some remote spot farther west, but a tract of land between the James and Big Sioux rivers, in eastern Dakota. This scheme was opposed, for different reasons, by the congressional delegations from Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, by Episcopal missionary Samuel D. Hinman, and by the Indian Bureau itself. The plan went as far as the issuance of an executive order, dated March 20, 1867, closing the proposed reservation to white settlement, but Hinman persuaded the chiefs to reject it, and nothing further came of it. 11 Although the scheme was defeated, the Santees were not quite through moving. In the spring of 1867 they were instructed to move to a point a few miles below the agency and plant there one season, "with the assurance that if they were pleased with the location it would be secured to them as a permanent home." 12 This proposed new location, called Breckenridge after a city projected for the site in the early days, was said to be favored by the Indians and had the advantage, as the new superintendent, Hampton B. Denman, saw it, of being well supplied with hardwood timber. The Bazile Creek site had been virtually denuded of timber during the Indians' brief stay there, and the nearest timber was at Breckenridge, where much of the lumber used in the construction of houses and other buildings the previous fall had been obtained. 13 On the strength of the promise made to the Indians, Agent Stone ____________________ 11 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1866, p. 229; Memorial to the President of the United States Relative to the Removal of the Santee Band of Sioux Indians, January 10, 1867; Ignatius Donnelly and William Windom to Secretary of Interior Orville Browning, March 20, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR; Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 3062; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I, 897-898; J. P. Williamson to Riggs, May 3, 1867, Riggs Papers. 12 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, p. 246. 13 James M. Stone to Denman, May 27, 1867; Denman to Bogy, January 8, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR; J. P. Williamson to Mrs. T. S. Williamson, November 3, 1866, Williamson Papers. -159- went ahead during the summer of 1867 and moved the agency buildings to the new site. As soon as the breaking plows that had been ordered arrived, early in June, he set part of the teams to breaking new land there while the rest were used to haul the buildings. About two thirds of the plowing that year was done in the Breckenridge vicinity, the rest at the old Bazile Creek site. A good deal was accomplished that summer, and if grasshoppers had not made one of their periodic incursions and destroyed the crops, it might have marked a real step toward self-sufficiency for the Santees. 14 Grasshoppers were not the only source of trouble that summer, however. Although the new agency site was on previously reserved lands, some of the most valuable timber lay just east of the reservation boundary, and in order to acquire it (and for other reasons), Denman recommended the addition of one full and one fractional township to the east of the reservation as it then existed. He also recommended that two of the originally reserved townships, including that on which the townsite of Niobrara was located, be restored to the market. His suggestions were not acted upon immediately, and in the interval certain Dakota citizens got wind of the plan and set about taking claims on the sections containing the timber Denman especially wished to reserve. Technically within their rights, since no order had been issued withdrawing this land from entry, they refused to move away when Stone informed them that the land where they were cutting timber and building a house had been reserved for the Indians. 15 Under the impression that the lands had already been withdrawn, Hinman had begun building a mission, when he was interrupted by a pair of "meddlesome squatters from Dacota," as Denman called them. The wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly, and it was not until November 16 that an executive order was finally issued adding to the reservation the lands desired by Denman and restoring to the market the township containing the townsite. 16 A delegation of Indians who had gone to Washington early in 1867 to consider the proposal to remove them to Dakota had been told then that another peace commission would visit them the next summer. When it arrived, about harvest time, its message was not calculated to please the Indians. According to Agent Stone, they were told "that ____________________ 14 Stone to Denman, May 31, June 5, and September 21, 1867, NARS, RG 75, L.R. 15 Denman to Bogy, January 8, 1867; Stone to Denman, August 30, 1867, ibid. 16 Samuel D. Hinman to Denman, August 30, 1867; Denman to Acting Commissioner Charles E. Mix, September 5 and 6, 1867, ibid.; Kappler. Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I, 862. -160- they must leave here next Summer, that none would be allowed to remain unless they abandoned their tribal relations and relied upon their own exertions for support." 17 Although this threat was doubtless intended to stimulate the Santees to greater efforts in their own behalf, its effects were in fact demoralizing. The tribesmen were unwilling to give up their tribal relations, and they were unprepared to take upon themselves the full task of their support. The result was that instead of working harder, they almost gave up working at all. Stone and Denman believed that, after the "debased and indolent life led by these Indians" since leaving Minnesota, it would take several years of intensive training before they could be placed on their own, and instead of being hauled off to a new reservation, they should be allowed to sink their roots deeply into the one where they were. 18 This recommendation, sensible as it was, did not coincide with the plans of the peace commissioners, who wished to set up a vast reservation--a northern Indian territory--bounded by the forty-sixth parallel, the Missouri River, the Nebraska border, and the 104th meridian. In their report to the President the next January they included the Santees among the tribes to be placed on the reservation, although they added that it might be advisable to let them and the other Nebraska tribes remain where they were and become incorporated with the citizens of the state. They persuaded the Santees to allow their chiefs and headmen to inspect the country that had been designated for them on the proposed reservation, but it was found to be much like Crow Creek. To their objections, voiced by the agent and superintendent, the only comfort Commissioner Nathaniel G. Taylor could give was the instruction to tell the Indians that it would be "perfectly safe" for them to plant and that they would "not be removed from their present location against their own consent." 19 His promise apparently did not satisfy the Indians, for at the end of April, 1868, Stone wrote that even those who had formerly been the most industrious were refusing to plant this year. They expected the peace commission back that summer, to tell them to move. With an unconscious irony that one more familiar with their history would have noticed, Stone observed that their uncertainty tended to weaken their ____________________ 17 Stone to Denman, November 30, 1867, NARS, RG 75, LR. 18 Stone to Denman, January 31, 1868; Denman to Commissioner Nathaniel G. Taylor, February 3 and 17, 1868, ibid. 19 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, pp. 46, 246-247; N. G. Taylor to Denman, March 3, 1868, NARS, RG 75, LR. -161- respect for the government and for their agent, and might eventually destroy their faith in the integrity of the men in charge of that government. 20 Denman repeatedly went to bat for the Santees. Submitting Stone's remarks to the commissioner, he added his own comment that they had suffered enough in the previous six years to atone for any crimes they might have committed during the uprising and that it was now time to show "magnanimity and kindness." In his official report for 1867 he had stressed their atonement: All treaties with these Indians have been abrogated, their annuities forfeited, their splendid reservation of valuable land in Minnesota confiscated by the government, their numbers sadly reduced by starvation and disease; they have been humiliated to the dust, and in all these terrible penalties the innocent have suffered with the guilty. He asked for a treaty commission to guarantee them their present reservation and recommended that part of their annuities be restored. 21 When another peace commission went up the Missouri in June, 1868, it stopped at the Santee Agency just long enough to gather the chiefs and virtually force them to accompany the party to Fort Rice. The outlook was ominous. Williamson wrote to his father that " Stone says the Commissioners talked more independent than last year. They said they had made up their minds the Santees could not stay in Nebraska so they were going [to] tell them at once that they had to go up in the new T[erritory] when they came to council. It was all a humbug to ask what they wanted when the dose was all ready cut & dried." 22 The outcome was not so bad as he and the Indians expected, however. When the chiefs returned from Fort Rice, they had signed, on behalf of the Santees, the 1868 treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux. The provisions of that treaty which affected the Santees were those providing for the allotment of lands to anyone desiring to farm. The act of March 3, 1863, had contained a similar provision, but now the Indians' consent was obtained and the size of the proposed allotments increased from 80 to 160 acres. According to Stone's annual report, the commissioners assured the Indians that if they would adopt white customs, take land in severalty, and begin farming, the government would allow them to remain where they were and assist them generously in their efforts. 23 ____________________ 20 Stone to Denman, April 30, 1868, ibid. 21 Denman to N. G. Taylor, June 12, 1868, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1867, p. 265. 22 J. P. Williamson to T. S. Williamson, June 19, 1868, Williamson Papers. 23 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, p. 247; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 999-1000. -162- The 1868 Fort Laramie treaty, the last participated in by the Santee Sioux, provided the basis for most legislation concerning them in subsequent years. If its terms left their situation still somewhat indefinite, the allotment provision gave them some measure of security. The stage which may properly be called the establishment of the Santee Reservation came to an end in the summer of 1869, when the boundaries were finally determined. To forestall threatened immigration into a township adjacent to the reservation, an executive order was issued on August 31 withdrawing it from entry and sale; at the same time three townships south and southwest of Niobrara which had never been occupied by the Santees were restored to the market. These changes left the Santee Reservation a compact rectangular tract of land, twelve miles from east to west and averaging about fifteen miles from north to south, encompassing 115, 075.92 acres. It included some good agricultural land, particularly in the southern and eastern parts and along the streams, but a great deal of it was suited only for grazing. One superintendent, after examining the reservation, described it as "the roughest and least valuable tract of country I have seen in Nebraska, a large part of it being bluffs and steep hills only fit for pasturage." His successor doubted that the bluff land, covered with wild sage and cactus, was good even for pasture, except in the ravines. In the 1890's, when the potentialities of the area had been more fully revealed, a member of Congress commented that "for the past three or four years, on account of the extreme drought, it would be difficult to graze one steer on five acres of these high lands on the Missouri bluffs." 24 Though parts of the Santee Reservation, especially the wild, rugged area called the Devil's Nest, possess a certain austere beauty, agriculturally it was no substitute for the rich lands of the Minnesota valley taken from the Indians by Congress in 1863. The year 1869 brought other changes to the Santee Sioux. As part of President Grant's revamping of Indian policy, the Northern Superintendency was turned over to the Society of Friends. Samuel M. Janney replaced Denman as superintendent, and his brother, Asa M. Janney, was appointed Santee agent. The Janneys, natives of Loudoun County, Virginia, were both in their late sixties when they came to Nebraska and were lifelong members of the Society. Samuel, the elder by two years, was the author of at least ten books and pamphlets, including ____________________ 24 Hinman to Commissioner Ely S. Parker, June 29, 1869, NARS, RG 75, LR; Samuel M. Janney to Parker, August 19, 1871; Barclay White to Parker, January 11, 1872, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency; Kappler, Indian Afffairs, Laws and Treaties, I, 862-864; 54th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Rpt. 1362, p. 7. -163- some poetry on Indian themes. He had at one time operated a girls' boarding school in Virginia and had interested himself in Negro education before the Civil War. The two men were full of ideas about the management of the agency, ideas which, for better or worse, continued to affect the Santee Sioux long after the Janneys had left office. 25 One of the pet schemes nursed by Agent Janney, who had been a miller in his home state, was to build a gristmill on Bazile Creek, move the agency there, and establish the Indians on farms surrounding this administrative center. There was no flour mill within forty miles, and it was thought that a considerable saving could be made by grinding the wheat raised by the Indians rather than shipping in flour, as had been done in the past. Shortly after he took office, Janney began drawing up specifications for a mill, and construction got under way in 1870. After several delays, the mill was finally ready to start grinding in June, 1871. No sooner had it begun operating, however, than portions of the dam gave way because of the porous nature of the soil. Such accidents continued to interrupt milling activities throughout the years the mill was in operation. A fine three-story chalkstone structure, it speedily became a liability rather than an asset to the agency and eventually had to be abandoned. 26 Janney's hopes for moving the agency to Bazile Creek were never realized, but another project of his, an Indian police force, did become a reality. The idea originated when the chiefs refused to take action against one Mazazidan, who was charged with abusing his wife and stealing horses. Janney and his employees were finally obliged to arrest Mazazidan themselves, but the agent thought it would be better to have a corps of men, carefully selected for reliability, who would be responsible to the agent for the maintenance of law and order. In October, 1869, he asked for, and shortly received, authority to organize a police force to consist of one man from each of the six bands, chosen by the chiefs. At first he tried paying them on a fee basis, so much for each arrest, but he found them overzealous and had to abandon that policy ____________________ 25 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1868, p. 5; Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), pp. 73-74; William Bacon Evans, "Dictionary of (American) Quaker Biography," ms in Quaker Collection, Haverford College. 26 S. M. Janney to Parker, August 20, 1869, and June 17, 1870; Asa M. Janney to S. M. Janney, September 17, 1869, January 10, June 27, and November 12, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR; A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, June 4 and 21, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 108. -164-
· Title: History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial · Publisher: University of Nebraska Press · Publication Date: 1993 · Page No: * in favor of a flat wage of five dollars a month. 27 Except for a few intervals, the police force, one of the first such experiments on any reservation, remained a permanent institution at Santee for the rest of the nineteenth century. Janney's most important achievement during his two years as agent was the allotment of land to the Indians and their settlement on farms scattered over the reservation. The uncertainty of their tenure led some of the more thoughtful to the conviction that their only security lay in the allotment of land in severalty. Fearing that nothing would be done toward this end at Santee, and resenting the authority of the old chiefs, a number of the men who had emancipated themselves from tribalism while at Davenport left the reservation in the spring of 1869, together with their families, and took up homesteads in the valley of the Big Sioux River, in the vicinity of the later town of Flandreau, South Dakota. To forestall similar action by others, Janney began to press strongly for allotment almost as soon as he became agent. He called the Indians together in the summer to tell them of his plans and to get their reaction. He was able to report a favorable response, and sent to Commissioner Ely S. Parker a petition from the chiefs and headmen asking for allotment as a means of preventing a further exodus by men who believed " that the Government does not intend to give them here a permanent home." 28 Although Janney's first intention was to allot 160 acres to each of two hundred heads of families, under the terms of the 1868 treaty, he later adopted the plan of allotting smaller farms of 40 and 80 acres, as specified in the act of March 3, 1863. He proposed to spend $329 per family, this sum to cover a house (for fifty dollars), a yoke of oxen, a stove, a cow, six sheep, two goats, and two hogs. It would be best, he thought, to settle the valleys first, since they contained the land best suited for the Indians and also because there was a threat of a land grant to a railroad that would follow the course of Bazile Creek. 29 As with his other projects, the allotment did not proceed quite as Janney wished. There were delays in the survey, and the agent was faced with knotty problems such as how much land to give a man with more than one wife. By the end of May, 1870, however, two hundred farms of So acres and two ____________________ 27 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, October 19, 1869, and January 22, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR. 28 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, June 19, 1869; Chiefs and Head Men to Commissioner Parker, July 19, 1869, ibid. 29 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, October 1, 1869, and January 10, 1870; S. M. Janney to Parker, January 3, May 31, and June 17, 1870, ibid. -165- hundred 40 acres had been laid out. Some Indians had already settled on their farms then, and by the next spring about sixty families were thus located, despite a drought the previous year which had resulted in an almost complete crop failure. 30 In his last annual report, made in July, 1871, Janney wrote that about 80 houses had been built on individual allotments and furnished with windows and doors from a sawmill which he had set up two years earlier. Most of the houses had tables, often covered with oil cloth; bedsteads, cupboards, and benches or seats were common now. Over 150 bed quilts had been made in the previous eighteen months. Some women were raising chickens, and nearly half the families had cows. 31 It should perhaps be mentioned that the Indians did not receive patents for these allotments. Instead, they were given certificates which stated that the United States would hold the title in trust for the holder and his heirs so long as they continued to occupy the land. It was specified that these certificates conferred no right except that of possession; further legislation by Congress would be required to convey a fee simple title. 32 The decade of the 1870's witnessed a gradual decline in the numbers of the Santees. From 974 in 1870, the population dwindled to 791 four years later and to 736 by 1879. 33 The most important single event among many that conspired to bring about this decline was a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1873. About the middle of August a Santee prostitute returned from Fort Randall with a case of what the agency physician diagnosed as syphilis. A scattering of other cases appeared in following weeks, but not until September 25 was the disease recognized as smallpox. By that time it was out of control and the physician himself was down with it. In response to an appeal from the agent, Joseph Webster, the Indian Office sent a special agent to take over and employed a Yankton physician, who hurriedly erected a crude hospital and vaccinated everyone he could. By mid-December the epidemic had run its course, after causing at least 7 deaths out of 150 cases. The effects of the outbreak were similar to those accompanying the great ____________________ 30 S. M. Janney to Parker, February 8, March 11, and May 31, 1870, ibid.; S. M. Janney to Parker, February 21, 1871; A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, May 1 and July 5, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, p. 227. 31 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, pp. 441-443. 32 Sample certificate (no date), NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 33 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, August 20, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 36; 1879, p. 236. -166- plagues of the past. People fled their homes and camped in isolated places, or else turned the sick out of doors and left them to die in the bushes. Many fled the reservation entirely and never returned. 34 Thus the Santee population was considerably reduced both through the deaths themselves and through the panic-stricken flight of many who did not catch the disease. Despite this outbreak and repeated crop failures, which also caused many departures from the reservation, the population did not diminish fast enough to suit the white population, now filling up the surrounding country. In 1871 a Niobrara merchant wrote Senator P. W. Hitchcock demanding the restoration to the market of the Santee Reservation. "The Counties below are pretty well settled up," he wrote, " most of the good Land that is not occupied by settlers is in the hands of speculators, the emmigration to our County has been good this year and I think next year all the Land will be taken by actual settlers and if you will be kind enough to get those Santee Indians out of Nebraska, the emmigration will be much larger yet." He claimed, with some exaggeration, that the reservation constituted the best part of the county. 35 When the town of Niobrara acquired a newspaper, it served as a medium of expression for those who wished to have the Indians removed. Edwin A. Fry, the spitfire editor of the Niobrara Pioneer, argued that the Indians were kept there in order to furnish jobs for the agency employees, who "generally see that their red charge get paid for loafing." 36 In the next years hostility to the Sioux, following the Battle of the Little Big Horn and other conflicts, was extended to the Santees, although no one could by that time have taken very seriously any talk of an uprising by them. When removal of the Poncas to Indian Territory was broached in 1877, local sentiment demanded that the Santees accompany them, and an effort was made in Congress to include them in the Ponca removal bill. It was true, said the Pioneer, that they dressed as white men, but this was at government expense, as was their farming. When the Poncas were removed, there was some agitation to have the ____________________ 34 Dr. George Roberts to Commissioner Edward P. Smith, November 6, 1873; White to E. P. Smith, December 22, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 35 H. Westermann to Senator P. W. Hitchcock, November 3, 1871, ibid. Westermann was later said to be a contender for the post of Santee agent, to the dismay of the Indians, who got up a petition protesting against his appointment, on grounds that he was a drunkard, "a man who defies God," and an Indian-hater. "For ten years he has been working to drive off the Santee people from this land," said the petition. See Petition to Commissioner Hiram Price, March 14, 1882, ibid. 36 Niobrara (Nebr.) Pioneer, October 20, 1874. -167-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:39:07 GMT -5
Santees placed on the old Ponca Reservation as a buffer between the Teton Sioux and the white settlements. When all these efforts failed, the tactics were changed to a demand that the Indians be allotted lands in severalty, without restrictions. "If the Santee Indians would consent to abandon their tribal relations and receiving government aid, we apprehend that no one would object to their locating in our country," wrote editor Fry--meaning, of course, that their lands would soon find their way into white possession. 37 Despite the sense of insecurity this constant agitation for removal engendered in the minds of the Santees, there was fairly steady progress toward adoption of the white man's way in the 1870's. Perhaps the most significant evidence of change was the increasing pressure during the decade for abandonment of the old political system with its chiefs, and the substitution of an elective system patterned after that of the white community. Growing out of the experience with the Hazelwood Republic on the old reservation in Minnesota, and encouraged strongly by the American Board missionaries, this movement began to manifest itself in 1873, although there had been tentative moves in that direction before the Flandreau exodus four years earlier. A petition from the Indians requesting the change was prepared in August, 1873, misplaced during the smallpox epidemic, and recovered the next spring, at which time it was forwarded to the Secretary of the Interior. Noting that there was opposition from elements of the tribe, Secretary Delano recommended taking no action until the Indians had discussed the matter in council and determined the will of the majority. 38 The proposal was presented to the Indians for a vote in June, 1874, and defeated by a slender margin. Agent Webster thought that the republican element was growing in strength and that the Indians should be allowed to work the matter out among themselves. 39 When the subject came up again the next February, the hereditary chiefs, most of whom were old men, presented a petition in which they charged that they could not legally be removed without an act of Congress "at the behest of a mean sentiment, attractive to all young and half-enlightened people, 'that the right of suffrage brings always prosperity.'" Behind the chiefs in promoting this Tory point of view was the Episcopal missionary, Hinman, then as usual at odds with the American Board ____________________ 37 Ibid., February 15, 1877; May 31, 1878; and February 28, 1879. 38 Petition to Commissioner E. P. Smith, August 27, 1873; Webster to E. P. Smith, March 12, 1874; Secretary of Interior Columbus Delano to E. P. Smith, March 28, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Niobrara Pioneer, April 26, 1878. 39 Webster to E. P. Smith, June 16, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -168- people. In reply, the advocates of an elective system, supported by the latter faction, presented a petition pointing out that if the Indians were to adopt white ways, the institution of the chieftainship would have to go. 40 The movement for elective officers received a stimulus from the death of the head chief, Wabasha, on April 23, 1876. By that time even Hinman had come around to the point of view that perhaps the Santees had outgrown the chieftainship, especially since the chiefs and headmen exerted little influence over the tribe. He suggested that another election be held to determine the future political pattern of the Santees. If they should decide upon an elective system, let the reservation be divided into four districts, with two councilors from each, to hold office for two years. 41 With the missionaries in substantial agreement on the policy to be adopted, the principal obstacles to another election had been removed. When the election was finally held, on January 22, 1878, all seventy-four votes cast favored the abolition of the old system. There were another forty-one eligible voters, ten of whom were also in favor of a change, thought the agent. The pattern proposed by Hinman was followed in the subsequent election for councilmen. Most of those elected were of the "progressive" faction, but Napoleon Wabasha, son of the late chief, was returned from his district. 42 Although the actual power wielded by the council was negligible, the peaceful adoption of the elective system was evidence of the transformation that was taking place among the Santees. The Indians' relatively rapid acceptance of the white man's political methods was not accompanied by comparable progress toward economic self-sufficiency, despite the best efforts of the successive agents. Perhaps the most serious hindrance to their attempts was the region's susceptibility to drought, grasshopper infestation, and other obstacles to successful agriculture. During the early and middle seventies, years of passably good crops alternated with years of partial or total crop failure. 43 Although conditions toward the end of the decade were better, drought was to return in the 1880's. ____________________ 40 Webster to E. P. Smith, February 27 and June 5, 1875; Petition from Chiefs to E. P. Smith, February 19, 1875, ibid. 41 Hinman to Commissioner John Q. Smith, January 16, 1877; Charles Searing to J. Q. Smith, January 8, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. 42 Isaiah Lightner to Commissioner Ezra A. Hayt, January 23 and April 20, 1878, ibid.; Niobrara Pioneer, April 26, 1878. 43 A. M. Janney to Parker, February 21, 1871; Webster to E. P. Smith, June 19, 1874; Webster to White, July 17, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, pp. 442-443; 1872, p. 217; 1873, p. 188; 1874, p. 208; 1875, p. 323; 1876, p. 100. -169- Convinced that self-sufficiency could be attained if only the Indians would work harder, the Indian Office did its best to encourage them to greater exertions; but it was too far from the scene to time its inducements to the vagaries of the weather. The 1868 treaty had provided for prizes to be awarded to the farmers raising the best crops. Offered at Santee in 1870, they went to two men, both past sixty; no mention was made of the premiums in later years. 44 Another type of stimulus, used repeatedly, was the threat to withdraw rations. But the Indians could hardly be blamed if grasshoppers took their crops, and the government was always prepared, if sometimes tardily, to provide the necessities in such cases. All through the seventies there was talk of reducing or eliminating rations altogether. In 1873--a good year--the Indians received with equanimity the news that their subsistence would be discontinued after the next fiscal year. But after the almost total failure of crops the following summer, missionary Alfred L. Riggs wrote the commissioner that if this policy were carried out, there would be great distress and some Indians would wander off, perhaps permanently. 45 In view of the predicament the Indians were in, the issue of rations was reinstated. Nevertheless, the agent proposed to continue a policy, begun in 1874, by which all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were required to work for any rations they received. The terms were modified at the beginning of 1876 to include work on their own allotments. 46 The principal crop on the Santee Reservation was wheat. Wheatraising began on a significant scale in 1876, when 166 acres were sown, and the agent requested a smaller quantity of wheat in his quarterly estimates for subsistence. The acreage increased rapidly, until in 1879 more than 1,200 acres were sown. Threshing machines, reapers, and cradles became important articles in the agent's requests beginning in ____________________ 44 A. M. Janney to Parker, February 21, 1871, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Kappler, Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, II, 1002. 45 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, p. 188; Alfred L. Riggs to E. P. Smith, August 7, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. The food given the Indians was no more than enough to sustain life. In the fall of 1874, for example, each individual received a weekly ration amounting to 4 1/2 pounds of beef, 3 1/2 pounds of flour, 5 1/2 ounces of pork, 3 ounces of sugar, and 1 1/2 ounces of coffee, plus 8/13 ounce of soap and 1/2 ounce of tobacco. The last four items were issued only once per quarter. The usual practice was to give each head of family a ration ticket, with the number of rations he was entitled to, at the start of each quarter. These were presented at the agency warehouse each Saturday. See Webster to White, December 17, 1873, and Webster to E. P. Smith, November 6, 1874, ibid. 46 Searing to J. Q. Smith, December 15, 1875, ibid. -170- 1876. He did not always get what he asked for, but in 1877 three reapers were at work in the fields, and two years later there were thirteen. The increase in other machinery was equally impressive. By the end of the decade sixteen horse rakes and thirteen mowing machines were in operation. 47 All this activity on the reservation, however, did not by any stretch of the imagination mean that the Santees were self-sufficient. There was probably a measure of justice in the Pioneer's charges that government employees were doing their work for them. Intermittent drought and grasshopper invasions were not the only reasons for the failure of the Santees to become self-supporting. As has always been the case in the management of Indian affairs, the effort in their behalf was subject to frequent interruptions and changes of direction. For one thing, the agency changed hands more often than was desirable. Webster, who had taken over from Janney in 1871, remained only until 1875 and was under attack during much of his term for displaying a lack of energy. Upon his resignation, Charles H. Searing, who had previously been steward at the agency school, took over and held the office for less than two years. Then Isaiah Lightner was nominated for the post, but because his nomination was not acted upon by the Senate, he had to be content with the position of "farmer-in-charge" for about a year, under the jurisdiction of the Yankton agent, John G. Gassman. Conditions at the agency suffered a regression during this interregnum, for Gassman, according to a later special agent, on the first day of his administration, "placed his hand improperly into the U.S. Treasury" and undermined the morale of his employees by his practices. Gassman was removed after a few months and another agent appointed at Yankton. Shortly afterward Lightner's appointment as agent was confirmed, and affairs at the Santee agency began to run more smoothly. 48 All the Santee agents during the seventies were Quakers, apparently hard-working, conscientious men, at least in so far as their correspondence and the absence of evidence to the contrary can furnish a key to their character. ____________________ 47 Searing to J. O. Smith, April 26 and May 1, 1876, ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1877, p. 147; 1879, pp. 104-105. 48 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, July 5, 1871; S. M. Janney to Parker, July 11, 1871; William Dorsey to Parker, June 20, 1871; White to Webster, May 29, 1874; B. R. Cowen, Acting Secretary of Interior, to E. P. Smith, August 12, 1875; Searing to E. P. Smith, October 6, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Lightner to J. Q. Smith, May 1, 1877; White to Hayt, December 8, 1878; John W. Douglas to Hayt, July 2, 1878; White to B. Rush Roberts, October 11, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -171- Another reason for the lack of continuity on the reservation was the vulnerability of the Indian Office itself, which was politically controlled and had to respond to the same pressures as other government agencies. The panic of 1873 brought a general retrenchment that was bound to affect the Santee agency in time. Agent Searing complained in 1876 that the "sweeping reduction in the employé force" had produced unfortunate effects at Santee. There was no money to pay the police force, for example, and their services, which had become quite valuable, had had to be dispensed with. During that summer the gristmill was idle and the various shops closed most of the time owing to a lack of men to operate them. 49 Janney's white elephant, the gristmill, was a source of much annoyance and may have played a role in delaying the agricultural progress of the Santees. At times when it was idle due to low water or a washout at the dam, the agent had to contract for flour at a price much higher than that charged for wheat. About the most that could be said for the mill was that the constant need for repairs provided employment for a number of Indians and thus enabled them to collect rations. 50 Yet despite all these handicaps there was progress in the direction desired by the men who formulated and executed Indian policy. Not only were the Santees cultivating more land each year, but they were adopting a good many of the customs and conveniences of white men. Houses were built; wagons, plows, harrows, and other implements were issued; and some Indians were encouraged to build up cattle herds. As early as 1873, Webster submitted a list of forty-eight men who could be trusted to take care of cows. That year the carpenter and his apprentices were kept busy making door and window frames, cupboards, benches, tables, and chests; about half the houses then boasted some or all of these conveniences. 51 For a time a matron was provided by the Society of Friends to visit the Indian women in their homes and instruct them in such household arts as soapmaking. The epidemic of 1873 may have had something to do with the emphasis on soap in the next year or so, as it undoubtedly did with the effort to substitute shingles for dirt roofs, and board floors for the bare earth. By 1877, 50 of the 153 houses had shingle roofs, and most of them had board floors. By ____________________ 49 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 100. 50 Edw. C. Kemble, U.S. Indian Inspector, to J. Q. Smith, January 22, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. 51 Webster to White, June 2, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1873, p. 189. -172- that time the men were reported to have adopted white man's dress in full, the women partially. 52 Another evidence of progress was that Indians were taking over an increasing proportion of the skilled and semiskilled labor at the agency. In 1875 the miller had an Indian apprentice, and another was being taught to run the steam engine at the sawmill. Three years later the blacksmith shop and gristmill were operated entirely by Indians, and another served as office clerk. As a consequence, the expenses for white labor had fallen from $9,760 in 1874 to $4,020 in 1878. 53 In his official report for 1879, Agent Lightner summed up the progress achieved by the Santees in the thirteen years they had been in Nebraska: A few years ago it was necessary for a white man to be with them to give directions in plowing, sowing, and caring for the crops; now they do their own plowing, planting, sowing, reaping, gathering, and threshing without the aid of a white man, and they are as capable of taking care of their machinery as many white people. He cited the nearly 2,000 acres planted that year, the 1,300 tons of hay put up, the 71,000 feet of cottonwood lumber cut, and the 8,000 bushels of wheat ground at the mill as evidences of their advancement. (The wheat had been purchased from white men, but for the season then just ending the Indians would have a surplus from their own crop.) The Indians, said Lightner, "look well as to where their pay is to come from for work," but they would work at the mill without pay. There was no loafing around the store, the agency was quiet at night, and doors could be left unlocked. About the only complaints he had were that some of the Indian couples lived together without benefit of marriage and that the inevitable designing whites were still trying to drive the Santees from their land. Later that fall, when he talked with the Indians on the subject of ending the weekly issue of rations, he told them that they would have to become self-supporting before they could become citizens. To this ultimatum they suggested that the issue be reduced to once every two weeks, which "would make them half citizens." 54 ____________________ 52 Webster to E. P. Smith, April 23 and May 8, 1874, and January 7, 1875; A. L. Riggs to E. P. Smith, September 25, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, p. 208; 1877, p. 147. 53 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1875, p. 232; 1878, p. 100. 54 Ibid., 1879, pp. 104-105 ; Lightner to Hayt, October 7, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -173- That is what the Santee Sioux were at the end of the decade of the seventies: half-citizens. In their adoption of the externals of white customs, they were well in advance of their relatives in Dakota Territory (except for the Flandreau colony) and probably living much like white pioneers on the Great Plains at the same period. In their economic thinking, particularly as concerned the relative merits of self-reliance and dependence on the government, they had quite some distance to go before their attitudes corresponded to those of the pioneers. In their religious and educational progress, they were a mixture of aboriginal and European elements, the proportions varying from individual to individual in a manner bewildering to white observers. All things considered, the Santees had come a long way since the misery of Crow Creek. In terms of assimilation to white culture, they had advanced far since their days in Minnesota; in terms of the integrity of their own culture, they had declined even more conspicuously.
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:39:22 GMT -5
-174- CHAPTER 9 The Quiet Decades By COMPARISON with the agencies for the wild Sioux to the northwest, the Santee Agency had a remarkably placid history during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. There were no periodic outbreaks of violence, no frightened appeals by the agent for military protection, no mass flights from the reservation by the Indians. Instead, there were the singing of hymns, the daily routine of the classrooms, the seasonal round of planting and harvest. The contrast was so great that George Hyde, historian of the Oglalas and Brulés, was led to say of the Santees, with considerable exaggeration, that in 1870, when Spotted Tail visited them, "They had placed themselves absolutely under the control of their missionaries, and they had little thought for anything in the world beyond piety." 1 To the extent that this generalization has any truth to it, the piety and docility of the Santees were due largely to the activities of the missionaries who had worked among them on the reservation in Minnesota, during the traumatic period of exile, and since their settlement in Nebraska. John P. Williamson and Samuel D. Hinman followed the Indians down from Crow Creek in the spring of 1866. The American Board missionaries attempted, without much success, to conduct school in tents that summer at the Niobrara townsite, and then moved in the fall ____________________ 1 George E. Hyde, Spotted Tail's Folk ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 167. -175- to Bazile Creek, where they remained until 1868. When they moved to Breckenridge, that spring, they began their work quite modestly, in a long log house used as a combined church and school. 2 The Episcopal mission started more ambitiously, with substantial buildings at Breckenridge in 1867, including a church that Agent Stone said would be the finest in Nebraska west of Omaha. The next year Hinman began work on a school, to cost $9,000, and followed it in 1869 with an addition to be used as a hospital. A tornado struck in June, 1870, however, and destroyed nearly everything. Although the mission was rebuilt in the next few years, its progress was considerably interrupted by this disaster. 3 Meanwhile the American Board people entertained larger ambitions than their initial efforts suggested. Williamson moved to the Yankton reservation in 1869 but was replaced the next year by Alfred L. Riggs, son of the Hazelwood missionary. Riggs' plan was to establish at Santee "a normal academy for the training of native teachers." Within a few months of his arrival a building program had been inaugurated, and by the winter of 1870-1871 the "Santee Normal Training-School" had an enrollment of 111 and an average attendance of 69. Although the great bulk of the enrollment in the early years was composed of day students from the immediate vicinity, even in that first year 13 came from other Sioux communities, mainly from Flandreau. By 1873 both the American Board and the Episcopalians had extended their operations and were reaching at least some of the children in outlying parts of the reservation with day schools. 4 Despite the promise held out by the denominational schools, the successive agents continued to recommend the establishment of a government manual labor school at the Santee agency. Their reasons are readily explainable in terms of traditional American notions about the separation of church and state and of the then current beliefs about the best way to lead the Indians to civilization. Although Indian education ____________________ 2 Winifred W. Barton, John P. Williamson, a Brother to the Sioux ( Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1919), p. 109; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1867, p. 284; 1868, p. 248; Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and 1: Forty Years with Sioux ( Boston: Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, 1880), p. 234; Mary Buel Riggs, Early Days at Santee ( Santee: Santee Normal Training School Press, 1928), p. 9. 3 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1869, pp. 341-342; 1870, pp. 234, 240; 1871, pp. 443-445; James M. Stone to Hampton B. Denman, January 31, 1868; Denman to Nathaniel G. Taylor, June 12, 1868; Asa M. Janney to Ely S. Parker, June 2, 1870, NARS, RG 75, LR. 4 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1870, pp. 234, 240; 1871, pp. 443-445; 1874, pp. 36-37; Mary B. Riggs, Early Days at Santee, p. 9. -176- had been carried on exclusively by churches and missionary societies up to about 1860, government-operated schools gained in popularity after the Civil War, and eventually government support was withdrawn from the mission schools. 5 Besides the widespread feeling that education, for Indians as for white children, was primarily the business of the state, there was a strong prejudice among Indian Bureau officials against conducting any schooling in the Indians' native language. Agent Janney, who first began agitating for an industrial school in 1871, said that although the mission schools, which taught in Dakota, might be doing a satisfactory job of preparing their graduates to become missionaries to their people, they were not giving the Indians the kind of education needed to fit them for eventual citizenship. So long as they were educated in their native tongue, said Janney, they were still Indians. And, as everyone knew, the primary aim of our Indian policy was to transform Indians into white men. In vain did Riggs point out that "education is more than language, and must use a medium that is understood. We cannot afford to wait for our scholars to know the English language before we begin their education." 6 Not until 1934 did the Indian Bureau finally recognize that the eradication of the Indian's native language was not necessary to his education and initiate a policy that aimed at giving the student a functional command of English without depriving him of the tongue of his ancestors. Janney resigned his position as agent before any concrete moves toward setting up an industrial school were taken, but his successor, Webster, pushed the project to completion. Opened in 1874, with thirty-six pupils and three teachers, the school seems to have been operated with reasonable success until 1877, when the Yankton agent briefly placed in charge at Santee nearly sabotaged it by first recommending that it be turned over to the Episcopal Church and then closing it at the end of the fiscal year. 7 It survived this blow, however, and, although its enrollment was down to twenty-five when Gassman closed it, by late in the next year it had increased to the point that ____________________ 5 Hildegard Thompson, "Education Among American Indians: Institutional Aspects," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, CCCXI ( May 1957), 96-97. 6 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, p. 442; Joseph Webster to Barclay White, December 6, 1872; Alfred L. Riggs to Ezra A. Hayt, December 22, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency. 7 Webster to White, December 6, 1872; White to Acting Commissioner H. R. Clum, February 3, 1873; White to B. Rush Roberts, October 11, 1877, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1874, pp. 36, 208-209. -177- another teacher was needed. As the term "manual labor" suggests, much of the work carried on at the school was vocational, chiefly agricultural, in nature. In 1878 twenty-three acres were cultivated, a figure which increased year by year. 8 Meanwhile, the mission schools were also expanding. The Episcopal mission was operating two day schools by 1875, one in connection with the Church of the Blessed Redeemer on East Bazile Creek (now called Howe Creek), the other at Wabasha's village, near where the Church of the Holy Faith was later erected. The American Board people were also operating a district school at their Bazile Creek outstation near the gristmill. All these schools were conducted by native teachers. The Normal Training School then had an enrollment of eighty-two, still drawn mostly from the immediate locality. A small press had been put into operation in 1871, and four years later the Iapi Oaye, or Word Carrier, a bilingual monthly periodical, was being issued in an edition of twelve hundred. A number of books of the Bible had been published, along with textbooks for use locally and in other schools among the Sioux. 9 Agent Lightner reported in 1877 that the agency was becoming a center of education for all the Sioux. During the previous winter the enrollment at the Normal School included two men from Flandreau, seven from the Cheyenne River Agency, and six men and seven women from the Yankton Agency. Altogether, forty-nine students, including those from remote portions of the Santee Reservation, were boarded at the residence halls. By this time the achievement of the school was impressive enough to draw praise from even so hardened a skeptic as editor Fry of the Niobrara Pioneer, who visited it in February, 1878. After describing the buildings and the service he attended, he concluded his article with what was, for him, high praise: "We spent a very pleasant day and came away convinced that many of the Indians we saw at the Mission were well along in civilized life." 10 Although the educational work was the missionaries' most conspicuous achievement, they were at least equally concerned with the spiritual growth of their Indian charges. As during the reservation days in ____________________ 10 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1877, pp. 147-148; Stephen R. Riggs to Edward P. Smith, August 5, 1873, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency; Niobrara Pioneer, February 8, 1878. 8 White to Hayt, December 8, 1878; Roberts to Hayt, November 19, 1878, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 99. 9 Samuel D. Hinman to Webster, April 3, 1875, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Sioux Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1875, pp. 323-324. -178- Minnesota, they felt that the two aspects of their work should go hand in hand. Hence besides their academic training, which had strong religious overtones, they conducted church services of various kinds. The Santees, if not quite so fanatically pious as they looked to Spotted Tail and his pagans, were assuredly "praying Indians" by this time. The missionaries tried to inculcate in them the same sense of stewardship and self-reliance that their clerical counterparts serving white congregations tried to stimulate. To keep the people from becoming beggars, a weekly collection was taken almost from the beginning of the American Board's mission work at Santee. Despite the protest that they were all poor, the Indians managed to scrape together $44.47 in pennies in the first eight months of 1871. By 1875, when their circumstances were somewhat improved, they had contributed during the previous year $65.20 for pastoral support, $23.04 for relief of the poor and sick, and $7.48 for missions elsewhere. 11 Among the less savory aspects of mission work among the Santees was the sharp sectarian rivalry between the American Board and the Episcopal Church. The complex and enigmatic personality of Samuel D. Hinman seems to have been one of the catalysts that precipitated this unseemly quarrel. A native of Connecticut, he had come as an orphan to Bishop Whipple's divinity school in 1859. His devotion to the Indians, both on the old reservation and during the months following the uprising, had confirmed the bishop's faith in him. He seems to have possessed certain traits of temperament, however, that made it impossible for him to work in harmony with ministers of other denominations. 12 Although government officials tried to stay clear of the controversy, they were inevitably drawn in. In defending Agent Webster against charges of favoritism by one of the religious bodies, Superintendent White described the situation at the agency with gentle sarcasm: Such is the zeal of said missionaries for the advancement of the Christian religion among the heathen . . . that a difficulty seems to have arisen between them, and it is notorious in the tribe that the missionaries themselves, have of late years, not been upon terms of ordinary civility and courtesy with each other. 13 As if this were not enough, Hinman was investigated by his own church ____________________ 11 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1871, p. 444; 1875, pp. 323-324. 12 Henry B. Whipple, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate ( New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), pp. 61-62. 13 White to William Dorsey, May 4,1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -179- authorities on charges of "gross immorality, misconduct and the dishonest and unfaithful use of money entrusted to him for the work of the mission," found guilty, and expelled from the reservation. When he tried to return and claim his property (which term he apparently construed to cover the mission property), there was actual violence, with armed white men, half drunk, coming from Niobrara to espouse either Hinman's cause or that of his adversaries. The situation finally quieted down in September of 1880, but Agent Lightner described the Indians as having been appreciably "unsettled" by the whole business. 14 As on other reservations occupied by relatively acculturated Indians, the biggest event at Santee in the last two decades of the century was the allotment of lands and the opening of the reservation to white settlement. But whereas this momentous event took place on most reservations after the passage of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, allotments at Santee preceded the Dawes Act by two years. Many of the original allotments made by Janney in 1870 and 1871 were later canceled because of the death or departure from the reservation of the allotees, and those of people who remained were later increased to 160 acres, wherever possible, to conform to the terms of the 1868 treaty. Although a number of the Santees met the requirements of that treaty in regard to improvements made and amount of land brought under cultivation, the years were allowed to pass without any action toward issuing patents to them. The delay was due partly to some uncertainty concerning whether the lands allotted should be inalienable and, if so, for how long. By 1877, Lightner believed that the Indians were ready to become citizens and take their lands in severalty, but he did not think that government guardianship should be withdrawn or that the reservation should be thrown open to white settlement. 15 In 1881, Congress passed a bill that provided a precedent for a policy on the Santee allotments. The important provision of this legislation, which concerned the Wisconsin Winnebagos, was a twenty-year inalienability clause. Lightner thought that it should open the way to the ____________________ 14 Niobrara Pioneer, March 1, July 28, 1877, and June 7 and July 14, 1878; Arnoux, Ritch & Woodford (counsel for Hinman) to Commissioner Roland E. Trowbridge, June 8, 1880; Isaiah Lightner to Trowbridge, June 24 and 28, 1880; William W. Fowler to Trowbridge, October 1, 1880; William H. Hare to Trowbridge, August 2, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. Hinman made several later attempts to regain "his" property, without success. 15 Acting Secretary of Interior M. H. Smith to E. P. Smith, August 21, 1874; Webster to E. P. Smith, August 5, 1874, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Charles Searing to John Q. Smith, August 9, 1876, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1877, pp. 147-148. -180- issuance of patents to the Santees. 16 Nothing was done until late the next year, however, when a Sioux commission visited the agency. Lightner had prepared the way by calling a council late in October, at which the Indians expressed a desire that patents be issued but also indicated a reluctance to allow any part of the reservation to be opened to white settlement. The old fear of being moved somewhere else still troubled them. When the commission arrived, in November, the Santees' assent was obtained to an agreement substantially embodied in the Indian appropriations act approved the next March 1. The relevant provisions of the act stated that patents issued under the terms of the 1868 treaty "shall be of legal effect," the United States to hold the land in trust for twenty-five years. 17 The Indians immediately began applying for patents, and by August, 1884, Lightner reported that application papers had been given to 127 landowners. No patents had yet been received, however, to the annoyance of the agent, who wanted them issued promptly so that the Indians could "come under the laws of the land and could vote--(for Blaine and Logan)." 18 Blaine and Logan did not win the election, and the lame duck administration of Chester A. Arthur received credit for opening the Santee Reservation to white settlement, by means of an executive order dated February 9, 1885, which specified that all lands remaining unalloted and unselected by April 15 should on that date be restored to the public domain and be made subject to settlement and entry on May 15. Immediately there came a protest from the white people of Knox County, who feared that not enough of the reservation would be left after Lightner had finished alloting lands. They objected especially to the allotment of 80-acre tracts to women and children under the terms of the act of March 3, 1863, in addition to the 160acre tracts on which patents were then to be issued. Fortunately for the Indians, they had a friend in Alfred L. Riggs, who sent off a series of letters to influential men in and out of the government, pointing out that to limit allotments to the 160-acre homesteads would leave many Santees with no land at all. The smaller allotments were made, though certificates rather than patents were issued to the recipients. 19 ____________________ 16 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1882, p. 117; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXI, 317. 17 Robert S. Gardner to Commissioner Hiram Price, July 3, 1882; Lightner to Price, November 8 and 22, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXII, 444. 18 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1884, p. 122. 19 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 864; A. L. Riggs to M. E. Strieby -181-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:40:02 GMT -5
After some delay, owing to a general relocation of families since the allotment made in the later 1870's, the process of assigning homesteads was completed before the deadline set by Arthur's executive order. The Santees now held 71,784-56 acres, plus 1,310.7 acres reserved for agency, school, and missionary use; 42, 160.56 acres were opened to settlement. By the time of Lightner's annual report for 1885, white farmers were scattered about the reservation, taking up land and putting up buildings. The agent thought that, on the whole, they were a good class of people, from association with whom the Indians stood to benefit. Of the 210 allotments made under the 1868 treaty, 132 of the allotees had complied with the terms of that treaty so as to be entitled to patents. Further legislation needed before patents could be authorized on the 485 smaller allotments was not forthcoming until 1898. 20 All was not well, however. White men began meddling in the Santees' affairs even before allotment had been completed. Some tried to determine the Indians' selections so as to be able to rent or run cattle on Indian lands adjacent to their own. Others began exerting pressure on the Indians to request that the twenty-five-year clause be waived. A petition bearing fifty-four signatures of Indians and asking for repeal of this clause was submitted to the commissioner in April, 1886. Denounced by the agent as an attempt by white men to get the Indians' lands, it presumably received no consideration at the Indian Office. 21 The Santees were better prepared for allotment than many other Indian groups, on whom it was virtually forced after the passage of the Dawes Act. They had been farming, after a fashion, for many years, and were less dependent on the rations issued to them than their Sioux relatives west of the Missouri in Dakota Territory. Lightner's plan to issue rations every two weeks had worked a hardship on the old and in- ____________________ (Corresponding Secretary of the American Missionary Association), March 9, 1885; Senator Charles F. Manderson to Commissioner John D. C. Atkins, March 22, 1885; petition from citizens of Knox County to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (undated, received April 10, 1885), NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1885, p. 136. 20 Lightner to Atkins, April 14, 1885, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1885, pp. lxiv, 136; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXX, 583. 21 Lightner to Atkins, May 27, 1885; Charles Hill to Atkins, April 17, 1886, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1886, p. 189. In 1886 a rumor was being circulated among the Indians that if they could get the restrictive clause repealed, they could buy lands at their old homes in Minnesota-a story to which some credence was lent by the purchase that year of lands for Sioux who had been living in Minnesota. See Chapter 13. -182- firm and had been abandoned, but he continued to press steadily for a reduction. There were problems, however. After he had divided the tribe into those who were self-supporting and those who still required rations, he began to wonder about the wisdom of such discrimination. His somewhat ungrammatical summary of his thinking on the subject expressed the dilemma faced by any conscientious Indian agent during that period: Now then here is A and B living side by side each have had the same care extended over them and because A has went to work and done as we wished him to do and been a good Indian and raised some wheat for sale you say stop his rations but B, because he has been careless and lazy you say feed him as I said I wish to advocate justice and nothing more and to stop the rations on the good ones and feed the bad ones would not in my judgement be justice. . . . 22 Despite his qualms, this was roughly the policy adopted in the early 1880's. But in 1883, Lightner was able to report that the issue of rations had "quite recently" been discontinued except to school children and about a hundred old and infirm persons. This policy had its drawbacks, however, in that those still receiving rations were sharing them with their relatives. Lightner thought an almshouse the proper solution to the problem, but none was ever provided. 23 The discontinuance of rations was symptomatic of a continuing improvement in the condition of the Santees during the early eighties. The amount of land under cultivation increased steadily until 1887, when it began to level off as a result of a succession of droughts. As early as 1880, 7,000 bushels of wheat were raised, 2,000 bushels of oats, and 3,000 bushels of corn. The heavy emphasis on wheat led, as elsewhere, to soil exhaustion and crop failures. By 1887 the acreage sown to wheat had dropped to little more than a quarter of the land under cultivation. 24 The amount of machinery also increased from year to year. By 1884 farming operations were conducted with the aid of 184 wagons, 134 cross-plows, 75 breaking plows, 28 mowing machines, 22 horserakes,10 reaping machines, and 3 threshing machines. The machinery ____________________ 22 Lightner to Hayt, February 4, 1880; Lightner to Trowbridge, March 20, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 107. 23 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1881, p. 127 ; 1883, p. 107 ; 1885, p. 137 - 24 Ibid., 1880, pp. 121 - 122 ; 1883, p. 107 ; 1885, p. 137 ; 1887, p. 154 ; Lightner to Price, August 9, 1881, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -183- was used by too many people, not all of whom were careful of it, however, and some of the mowing machines had been in use since 1868. Another evidence of progress was the gradual assumption by the Indians of the management of most work at the agency. In 1883, Santees were serving as blacksmiths, issue clerk, cattle herder, miller, harnessmaker, and brickmaker. Except for the physician and one clerk, all employees were Indians by 1888. "We do not inquire if the Indians will work," said Lightner, "for we know that by far the majority of them will work, and when we have it to be done, we ask, and the necessary labor is performed." The Indians built their own houses, drilled wells, and planted shade and fruit trees on their homesteads. The police force was revived during this period, and in 1884 a court of Indian offenses was instituted. Both the police force and the court were eliminated about 1891, to the regret of the agent, who claimed that drunkenness and gambling increased afterward. 26 Despite the unmistakable evidence of advance toward civilization on the part of the Santees, there was a continuing need for an agency to supervise their affairs. In fact, the agency plant grew more impressive during the eighties. In 1881 it consisted of a council house or office, two warehouses, a machine house, a sawmill, a smokehouse, an icehouse, a jail, a physician's office, a harness shop, two school buildings, three workshops, a trader's house and store, and six houses for employees; there were in addition two granaries, a gristmill, and a dwelling ten miles from the agency. The mill at Bazile Creek was finally abandoned in 1883 and the machinery moved to a new building erected at the agency, where it was powered by steam until 1891, when water from an artesian well was put to work turning its machinery. During the last twenty years of the century, other agency buildings were improved, log structures replaced by frame, or new roofs put on. 27 Lightner's long tenure as agent came to an end in 1885, perhaps as a consequence of his bold advocacy of the Republican ticket the previous year, and he was replaced by Charles Hill, formerly superintendent at the government school. Both men were investigated as a result of complaints by Indians and employees, but no evidence of dishonesty on the part of either was discovered. Like many other Indian agents of the ____________________ 26 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1884, p. 122; 1888, p. 172. 26 Ibid., 1880, p. 122 ; 1883, p. 108 ; 1881, p. 127 ; 1884, p. 124 ; 1887, p. 155 ; 1888, p. 172; 1880, p. 145 ; 1891, p. 295. 27 Ibid., 1881, p. 127 ; 1883, p. 108 ; 1891, p. 294 ; Lightner to Price, September 5, 1882, and September 28, 1883, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -184- time, they were unwilling to brook any opposition to their will from the Indians, and both seem to have employed physical violence against Indians who refused to submit to their authority. In later years Lightner served on the Philanthropic Committee of the Illinois Yearly Meeting of Friends, making Indian affairs his special concern. He settled at Monroe, Nebraska, only eight miles from the government Indian school at Genoa, in which he took a continuing interest. 28 Hill's successor in 1890 was James E. Helms, a young man who speedily got himself into difficulty with the Episcopal missionary and others. Although he was investigated, he was let off with "a very pointed message of reproof and counsel" by his superiors. Helms was succeeded in 1894 by Joseph Clements, who served without particular distinction through a trying period at Santee and was followed in 1898 by Henry C. Baird, a rather typical Indian agent of the old school who alienated Indians and white employees alike by his domineering manner. 29 It is probably fair to say that none of these men, except Lightner, the last Quaker to serve as agent, left any significant impress on the Santees. The power of an agent to do either good or harm had been much circumscribed since the days of Lawrence Taliaferro, when only the presence of the military provided any effective restraint on his actions. Exercising a limited jurisdiction over a fairly articulate Indian population living in close proximity to missionaries with powerful outside backing, and hemmed in by a white community that kept them under constant surveillance, the agents at Santee in the last two decades of the nineteenth century were mere functionaries of the Indian Bureau, already on their way to becoming anachronisms. Increasingly as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the primary instrument of government policy toward the Indians came to be the school. The government school at Santee had a checkered career during the 1880's and 1890's, plagued by fires and by frequent changes of administration. In its early years it was under the immediate direction ____________________ 28 Lightner to Atkins, December 1, 1885; Hill to Atkins, December 1, 1885; Gardner to Price, July 3, 1882; Petition of Indians to Price, January 30, 1884, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Petition of Chiefs to Commissioner, January 6, 1880; Lightner to Hayt, January 22, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies; Friends' Intelligencer, LXXX ( March 31, 1923), 231. 29 Marie L. H. Steer to Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan, November 17, 1891; J. A. Leonard to Morgan, December 26, 1891; President Grover Cleveland to James E. Helms, January 8, 1894; Joseph Clements to Commissioner Daniel M. Browning, March 15, 1894; Clements to Commissioner William A. Jones, October 2, 1897; Henry C. Baird to Jones, March 5, 1898, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -185- of the agent and was staffed, like the agency itself, by members of the Society of Friends; but after the creation in 1882 of the post of Superintendent of Indian Schools, a local superintendent was appointed, and regular government appointees occupied the teaching positions. Congress annually appropriated $3,000 for its operation, a sum described by the agents as inadequate. 30 Despite a declining general population, enrollment at the school continued to hold its own or sometimes even increase. Listed as having a capacity of 45, it had a total enrollment in 1884 of 84. Although the average daily attendance was much less, congestion was severe, especially after each of the successive fires. A special agent who visited in June, 1888, found 36 girls occupying a single sleeping room, three or four to a bed; much the same conditions existed among the boys. A new school was built, steam heated in order to minimize the danger of fire, and on June 22, 1889, it was formally opened. Its capacity of 100 was almost immediately exceeded, and 120 children were crowded in. By 1891 the number of students had increased to 142, as pressure was brought upon parents who neglected sending their children to school. 31 In the 1890's clashes between the superintendent and the agent were chronic, and between March, 1895, and February, 1896, a series of four fires, two of which were deliberately set by students, practically destroyed the school. In 1897 a $17,700 brick building, complete with hot and cold water in the lavatories and showers, was erected to replace those recently burned. At the end of the century the Santee Industrial School consisted of the two-story brick building, containing boys' and girls' dormitories, a kitchen, a dining room, a playroom, lavatories, and teachers' quarters, and a two-room frame structure valued at $600. 32 The Santee Industrial School was probably operated in much the same way as other Indian boarding schools of the period. To counteract the tendency of the children to come and go as they pleased, a stern regimen was imposed, which no doubt aggravated their dissatisfaction with school life. The published reports of the various superintendents reveal a strong concern for efficient operation but little or no sympathy for Indian children. On the other hand, there is no doubt that most ____________________ 30 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1880, p. 103; 1883, p. 109; 1885, p. lxx; 1874, p. 209. 31 Ibid., 1884, p. 123; 1888, pp. 174-175; 1889, p. 244. 32 Charles D. Rakestraw, Supervisor of Indian Schools, to W. N. Hailmann, February 27, 1896; Clements to D. M. Browning, August 7 and December 26, 1896; Baird to Jones, June 3, 1899, August 24, 1899, and May 24, 1898, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1896, p. 204; 1897, p. 184. -186- of the students found the physical conditions of school life more comfortable, particularly after the brick building was finished, than life in the ill-heated log houses in which most of their families lived. Whether this comparative luxury compensated for the rigid discipline imposed by the school authorities and the absence of parental affection is another question. While the Santee Industrial School was running its hectic course, the mission schools were proceeding steadily with their work. The Episcopal Church ran three day schools and a girls' boarding school for a number of years, and about 1882 opened Hope School, a small institution for boys across the river at Springfield, Dakota Territory. After the burning of the mission buildings at Santee in 1884, the girls' school, called St. Mary's, was closed and re-established the following year at Springfield. These church schools were later consolidated and at the beginning of 1896 rented to the government, which conducted the combined institution as a school for about fifty boys. 33 The Santee Normal Training School reached its high point in the 1890's, when it became in reality what its founder had envisioned it as being: a center of education for all the Sioux. Although Asa Janney wrote in 1871 that neither of the mission schools expected or desired government aid, requests for aid in the form of rations to nonresident scholars soon began reaching the commissioner; and in 1879, Riggs asked for a subsidy in the form of tuition payments of $20 per quarter per student. Knowing the commissioner's prejudice against teaching in Dakota, he requested support only in proportion to the amount of English taught. An agreement was entered into on September 21, 1880, for the support through tuition payments of an average of thirty pupils, and it was renewed the following year. 34 For more than a decade government aid in this form was extended to the school. In the early years the total amount was a modest sum--$2,271 in 1883--but it rose year by year, averaging over $12,000 annually from 1886 to 1893 and contributing importantly to the institutional budget. Although the support received from religious societies usually amounted to more than that amount, there were years in which the government contributed ____________________ 33 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1878, p. 99; 1879, p. 105 ; 1882, p. 115 ; 1884, p. 123 ; 1885, p. 138 ; 1887, p. 156 ; 1895, p. 206 ; 1896, pp. 203 - 204. 34 A. M. Janney to S. M. Janney, February 1, 1871; A. L. Riggs to E. P. Smith, August 5, 1873; John O. Means, Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to Price, August 25, 1881, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; S. R. Rigga to Hayt, January 24, 1879, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. -187- more than half of the total budget of the school, including rations issued. 35 Government subsidies were far from an unmixed blessing, however, for with aid came the threat of control. Santee Normal's most vulnerable point was its use of the Dakota language in its teaching, and Riggs was constantly obliged to defend the practice to each new commissioner. He managed to keep the anti-vernacular forces at bay for a time, but an uneasy peace reigned, interrupted frequently by grumblings from the Indian Office. In 1880 the Bureau adopted a regulation requiring the exclusive use of English but providing a loophole that permitted Santee Normal to continue its operations as before, but followed it in 1884 with a more stringent ruling and a threat to withdraw government support from any school using the vernacular. 36 The real blow came in 1886, when Commissioner John D. C. Atkins issued this peremptory order: "In all schools conducted by missionary organizations it is required that all instructions shall be given in the English language." In another order, dated February 2, 1887, Atkins went on to say: "The instruction of the Indians in the vernacular is not only of no use to them, but is detrimental to the cause of their education and civilization, and no school will be permitted on the reservation in which the English language is not exclusively taught." 37 When these instructions reached Riggs, he complied, but with great reluctance. In his official report he pointed out that in the normal department of the school the use of Dakota was "indispensable to the best instruction.""Things, not names," he said, "are what the true teacher must grasp; then names come afterwards." The theological classes had had to be suspended, he said, as the instruction had been almost entirely in Dakota, and the training of interpreters had likewise been terminated by the commissioner's order. Pointing out that the Santee Normal Training School represented "the high water mark of Indian advance more than any other school in the country," he reviewed its history and described its impressive physical plant, concluding: "And now this is to be dismembered and eviscerated by the order of the Government." 38 Complaints from Riggs and other missionaries drew from Commis- ____________________ 35 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 245; 1884, p. 123 ; 1885, p. 138 ; 1886, p. 193 ; 1887, p. 318 ; 1888, p. 377 ; 1889, p. 391 ; 1890, p. 329 ; 1891, pt. 2, p. 16 ; 1892, p. 771; 1893, p. 626. 36 Ibid., 1887, pp. xx-xxi. 37 Ibid., 1887, p. xxii. 38 Ibid., 1887, p. 162. -188- sioner Atkins a lengthy defense in his next annual report. Seeking precedents for his position, he noted that the peace commission of 1868 had advocated the establishment of schools for the Indians in which "their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted," and mentioned the regulations and orders of 1880 and 1884. In his own report of the previous year he had said: "The English language as taught in America is good enough for her people of all races." Now he appealed to patriotic impulses for support. "Every nation is jealous of its own language," he wrote, "and no nation ought to be more so than ours, which approaches nearer than any other nationality to the perfect protection of its people." 39 The possibility that the Indian nations might also be jealous of their own languages seems not to have crossed his mind. The literal application of Atkins' order might conceivably have included a ban on religious services in an Indian language. Although the Indian Bureau denied any such intent, some officials took it upon themselves privately to attack the practice of vernacular services. A special agent who visited Santee in 1888 questioned the propriety of prayers at the school delivered in the native language. He wrote: "It may be none of my business to invade the Sanctum Sanctorum, where infallibility is supposed to exist, or to make any remarks on this subject. I think the English vernacular is good enough for the Indians and more acceptable to the Deity than the Choctaw harangue delivered this morning." He thought that it would be best for the Indians to "forget their native habits with their native tongue as well, as soon as possible." 40 The flippancy of his comments, made in an official report, only underscores the basic lack of understanding of the Indian and the hopeless ethnocentrism of white Americans of the time. The financial support given the Santee Normal Training School by the government was too valuable to surrender at once, and Riggs submitted to the commissioner's order, though continuing to plead for its repeal. Finally, however, the strain of trying to accommodate the school's work to the demands of the government proved disproportionate to the benefits received, and in 1893 the government contract was terminated. 41 Santee Normal Training School had expanded greatly ____________________ 39 Ibid., 1887, pp. xx-xxii. 40 Hill to Atkins, December 27, 1887; W. H. Tallmadge to Acting Commissioner A. B. Upshaw, June 20, 1888, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1888, p. xvii. 41 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1894 pp. 194, 198. Perhaps Riggs saw the handwriting on the wall when he read Commissioner Morgan's report in 1891. Morgan expressed the hope that the day was not far off when the government would take sole -189-
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:41:03 GMT -5
during the years it received government assistance, but the loss of that support did not mean the end of the school. In 1883 it had been turned over by the A.B.C.F.M. to the American Missionary Association, a Congregational body, which operated it until the fourth decade of the twentieth century. 42 As conditions changed among the plains tribes, its function was altered, and it ceased to be exactly what it was in the 1880's and 1890's: a torch shedding its light throughout the Sioux country, working to build up a cadre of educated Sioux capable of extending its influence to other reservations. If Sioux outnumber Indians of any other tribe in a recent biographical dictionary of prominent Indians, part of the credit must go to the Santee Normal Training School, where some of them received their education. 43 Important though the educational history of the Santee Reservation is, it does not tell the whole story of the Santee people in the last years of the nineteenth century. To approach completeness, it is necessary to consider some of the problems that confronted the Indians and their agents in those years. Generally speaking, there were three categories of problems at Santee, as the agents saw the situation: those blamable to the vagaries of nature, those resulting from the persistence of old habits among the Indians, and those created by allotment and citizenship. Except for a great flood in 1881, which forced the town of Niobrara to move to a new site, most of the difficulties caused by weather and climate had to do with drought. After a series of fairly good seasons in the early eighties, a cycle of drought began in 1886 and continued for the next decade, with only occasional years of normal rainfall. By 1893 the agent referred to it as the "never failing drought." 44 White farmers in the surrounding area were hit as hard as the Indians, of course, but, ____________________ charge of Indian education. Public support for sectarian schools he found "contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution" and "utterly repugnant to our American institutions and our American history. . . ." Beginning in 1896, Congress started gradually reducing the annual appropriations for denominational schools, until 1900, when it appropriated only 15 per cent of the amount provided in 1895, "this being the final appropriation for contract schools." See ibid., 1891, p. 68 ; 1895, p. 10 ; 1896, p. 14 ; 1897, p. 13 ; 1898, p. 15 ; 1899, p. 16 ; 1900, p. 24. 42 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1883, p. 108. 43 Marion E. Gridley, ed., Indians of Today ( 3d ed.; Chicago: The Council Fire, 1960), lists twenty Sioux, as compared to seventeen Cherokees, who form the second largest tribal representation. An earlier edition ( 1947) lists fourteen Sioux, ten Cherokees. 44 Lightner to Trowbridge, April 1, 1881, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1881, p. 127; 1886, p. 190 ; 1893, p. 199. -190- as someone has said, they could usually return to the "wife's folks back east," while the Indians had nowhere to go. The situation became so serious that in 1893 the councilmen requested a return to the issuance of rations, after a decade of at least nominal self-support. The next year Agent Clements called attention to the "miserable, starving condition of many of the Indians under my charge." 45 Conditions were better in 1895 and 1896, but the next year drought struck again, as it did to some extent in 1898. The fact was, though the Indian Bureau refused to admit it, that the Santee Reservation (what was left of it) was incapable of supporting the number of people then living on it, given the climatic conditions of the region. The land was better suited to the range cattle industry, but allotment in severalty had so broken up the Indians' holdings that cattle could not be run over large expanses of territory. The problems arising from the survival of the old culture were not so serious as the agents thought they were, but some of them did constitute hindrances to the drive to make the Santees self-sufficient. The successive agents expended a great deal of ink and energy inveighing against the Indian dances, partly because they were seen as remnants of the barbarous past but mainly because they involved gift-giving on a large scale. Although Lightner reported in the early eighties that they had been entirely abandoned, this was only wishful thinking on his part. He permitted dances on Christmas, New Year's, and the Fourth of July because he saw them merely as social affairs at which the participants no longer recited brave deeds of the warlike past, but collected money for charity. 46 Unfortunately, the charitable intent of the dances tended to get out of control, especially when it took the form of generosity toward visiting tribes. When a party of Winnebagos paid a friendly call on their Santee friends in 1881, they put on a dance, in defiance of Lightner's orders, and took home eleven or twelve horses donated by their hosts. The agent, his authority flouted in the presence of his own Indians, was infuriated and wrote the commissioner: "I do not object to the giving so much as the manner in which the present was made, at a dance which they knew I had forbidden. . . ." 47 The same thing happened in 1890, much to the mortification of Agent Helms, who asked for authority to ____________________ 45 Santee Councilmen and James Garvie to Secretary of Interior Hoke Smith, September 5, 1893; Clements to D. M. Browning, June 22, 1894, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 46 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1882, p. 115; 1885, p. 137. 47 Lightner to Price, August 22, 1881, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. -191- withhold annuities from the Indians who had given away their horses and other property. In 1893 it was said that eighty-five horses and ponies, in addition to other stock, had been given away to a party of some 250 Winnebagos. 48 Although the official attitude was one of opposition to these survivals of old custom, at times the Indian Office was more lenient than the local agent. When Helms tried to stop the dancing in 1893, someone he characterized as a "half-breed agitator" telegraphed the Washington officials that the men who had served as scouts wanted to celebrate Cleveland's election. A department letter in reply said that as long as they violated no laws, there should be no interference. Helms sputtered about the harm done by the dances in delaying acculturation, but apparently did not interfere with them. By then they had become sufficiently exotic that white people in the surrounding towns were willing to pay to watch them. Riggs objected strongly, saying that the revival of "heathen war dances, as shows to gratify the white people, is a practice that works great damage." 49 Despite official proscription, this aspect of the traditional culture managed to persist down to the end of the century and beyond. It should perhaps be mentioned that the Santee Sioux appear never to have adopted the sun dance, which occupied a central position in the ceremonial life of the true plains tribes. Nor do they seem to have been affected by the ghost dance mania that caused so much unrest among the Tetons about 1890. At least there is no mention of it in the agents' correspondence from that period, except in reference to other groups. The dances indulged in by the Santees may have had their origin in the aboriginal religion and in the practice of war, but by the last decades of the century they had been shorn of most of their earlier significance and had become primarily social in function. They were not, of course, any more acceptable to the missionaries and government officials on that account. The agents also objected to the tendency of some of the Santees to go on periodic visits to other agencies. Usually these visits had no purpose other than pure sociability, but at times they took on a religious coloration, as when an Episcopal convocation was held at Rosebud in 1880. Lightner, who had no quarrel with the Episcopalians, objected to the Indians' absence for three weeks just at the time when they should have ____________________ 48 Helms to Morgan, November 24, 1890.; ibid.; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1893, p. 202. 49 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1893, p. 202; 1895, p. 204 ; 1889, p. 248. -192- been breaking new land and taking care of their wheat. Experience had shown, he said, that their cattle often got into the grain when the people were away from home. 50 Besides such brief visits and convocations, there was a certain amount of moving back and forth between Santee and the Minnesota colonies, and between Santee and Flandreau, depending on where benefits were currently being received. It is no accident that the biggest gains in the Santee population occurred when lands were being allotted and when cash payments were being made there, while the biggest losses in the eighties and nineties coincided with the distribution of land and other benefits to the Minnesota Sioux. 51 Some of the agents found sinister overtones in perfectly innocent Indian customs--customs which in some cases existed among white frontiersmen as well as among Indians. For example, Helms reported in 1891 that the Santee farmers had a tendency to form "bees" to do jobs most expeditiously managed by several people. He was encouraged, however, to think that the practice was on the wane. 52 In other respects, too, when the Santees behaved much like the typical wasteful frontier farmer, their actions were denounced as characteristically Indian. One agent complained that they bought farm machinery on credit, then left it outdoors to be ruined by rain and snow. Sometimes stock that had been issued to them was sold or neglected, and during the worst of the drought years they ate their hogs as fast as they were issued. When stallions were bought, the Indians sold the colts to white men or traded them for ponies. The limited amount of timber on the reservation had been used so prodigally that by 1892 there was little fuel left. 53 The allotment of lands, the issuance of patents, and the entry into full-fledged citizenship created difficulties for the Santees and their agents not foreseen by those who imagined that the Indian problem would be solved once the Indian became a landowner and a citizen. On one level there was the question of who was responsible for the roads and ____________________ 50 Lightner to Trowbridge, May 17, 1880, NARS, RG 75, LR, Nebraska Agencies. 51 The largest gains registered in any one year came in 1886 (gain of 44), when allotment was being completed; in 1893 gain of 45), when a substantial payment had just been made; and in 1898 (gain of 30), when another payment was made. The greatest loss came in 1887 (loss of 18), just after lands had been purchased for the Sioux in Minnesota. See Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1885, p. 135; 1886, p. 189 ; 1887, p. 156 ; 1888, p. 170 ; 1892, p. 311 ; 1893, p. 198 ; 1897, p. 183 ; 1898, p. 332. 52 Ibid., 1891, p. 293. 53 Ibid., 1895, p. 204; 1884, p. 121; 1890, p. 141; 1892, p. 311.
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Post by denney on Jul 26, 2006 1:41:45 GMT -5
-193- bridges in what had formerly been the Santee Reservation. In 1894, Helms wrote that since no tax could be levied on Indian lands and the poll tax could not be collected, it was impossible to keep the roads fit for travel. 54 The problem was eventually solved, after a fashion, by the gradual passing of Indian lands into white possession and the consequent increase in the tax base, but it remained to perplex agents and county officials until well into the twentieth century. Citizenship brought other, more serious problems. Helms wrote in 1892 that the Santees "vote, pay some taxes, . . . electioneer, and many of them drink whisky." Their voting was an advantage to them, in that it made them more desirable neighbors when an important election rolled around, and some took to politics in a small way. By the early 1890's two Santees were on the county board and worked to see that the agency got its share of the county road and bridge fund. A. J. ("Joseph") Campbell served as county coroner for a time. 55 If this participation in the political life of the community was seen as largely beneficial, the freedom to drink whiskey was not. With the coming of allotment, old laws regarding the introduction of whiskey into the "Indian country" became obsolete and were not immediately replaced by laws adapted to the new conditions. In the meantime (and afterward) the liquor problem gave much concern to the agents and missionaries. A temperance society was organized early in 1887, but its membership was so small that it probably had little influence on the Santees. In 1889, when the court of Indian offenses was functioning, twenty-one out of thirty-eight cases heard during the year were for drunkenness. 56 White men received much of the blame for the situation. Besides providing the Indians with liquor (for which there were many prosecutions in the later 1890's), they set anything but a good example, according to the Episcopal missionary. Agent Helms was charged with, among other offenses, bringing liquor to the agency and allowing what he did not himself consume to fall into the hands of the Indians. The agent who followed him attributed the drinking problem to the fact that the Indians considered themselves citizens, with the same rights as white people. The county was unwilling to take costly action, since the Indians paid few taxes and there was a general feeling that they were the respon- ____________________ 54 Helms to D. M. Browning (no date, received February 19, 1894), NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 55 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1892, p. 312; 1887, p. 154 ; Hill to Atkins, June 5, 1888, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 56 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1888, p. 173; 1889, p. 243. -194- sibility of the federal government. When liquor sellers were indicted, they sometimes pleaded guilty, were fined a dollar each, and were "sent home to repeat the work of debauchery." Some even charged that the liquor law was unconstitutional and threatened to carry their cases to the Supreme Court if necessary. 57 As long as there was no effective way of preventing white men from selling liquor to the Indians, the problem of drinking could not be solved. A different type of problem growing out of allotment was that of the children born since the reservation had been opened. As early as 1888 nearly a hundred children had been born since the land was allotted and were without hope of receiving farms when they reached maturity. On March 2 of the following year Congress passed a bill containing a provision that Santees who had not received allotments in 1885 should be entitled to farms of from 40 to 160 acres, on their reservation. Since there was no land available there, the provision remained a dead letter and was modified in 1891 by an appropriation of $32,000 for the purchase of lands elsewhere for those, mostly children, who had missed out on the earlier allotment. No such purchases were made, and the following year a clause was inserted in the Indian appropriations act permitting the payment in cash of this sum, together with the proceeds from the sale of the old Minnesota reservation. Payment of the latter sum was made in December of the same year, and the rest was paid in 1893. Besides the $32,000, the Santees received $34.93 per capita from the sale of the old reservation, and some of them were paid additional sums from an appropriation made for the benefit of scouts and their heirs. 58 The money came at a good time, in the midst of the drought years, but unfortunately it was not all spent as wisely as it might have been. Furthermore, the expectation of more such windfalls did irreparable damage to such habits of prudence, thrift, and industry as the Santees had acquired since 1866. The Episcopal missionary wrote in 1896: "Most if not all of what they expect is disposed of by credit at the stores long before it is received, and much is spent in rioting and drunkenness when obtained." The agents agreed that farming had fallen off, and habits of indolence had become prevalent. In 1896, Congress amended ____________________ 57 Ibid., 1888, p. 177; 1896, p. 202; 1897, p. 185. James J. Janney to Morgan, February 10, 1891; Steer to Morgan, November 17, 1891; Clements to D. M. Browning, March 16, 1894, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency. 58 Hill to Atkins, April 6, 1888; Helms to Morgan, December 2, 1892, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1893, p. 200; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXV, 890, XXVI, 720-721, XXVII, 145. -195- the act of March 2, 1889, so as to provide further benefits to the Santees. This legislation brought another payment, which, together with additional payments of interest on funds in the Treasury, made the Santees temporarily richer by $89,015.75 in cash, plus 18,499.13 in stock and farm implements. 59 Besides all the cash payments, the Santees were enjoying another kind of unearned income in the 1890's. Soon after allotment they discovered that they could make more money with less work by leasing part of their lands to white farmers than by trying to farm them by themselves. Abuses soon crept in. A farmer might lease an eighty-acre tract and then let his cattle roam far beyond the confines of that unfenced unit. As the years passed, the practice of leasing became more widespread and the abuses more flagrant. The early leases were entirely unofficial, based on mere oral agreements, but in time the Indian Office began making legal contracts with farmers and stock raisers, in the hope of thereby exercising some control over the manner in which the land was used. Most of the agents opposed leasing, on the ground that it contributed to the laziness of the Indian and postponed indefinitely the day when he would be truly self-supporting. 60 From a purely economic point of view, however, it was probably the best arrangement that could have been made for the use of lands like those on the Santee Reservation. Only a farmer or rancher with access to large amounts of land could hope to make a success of his operations in an area with so unpredictable a climate. To one who had watched the course of events since 1866, the condition of the Santees at the turn of the century was anything but encouraging. True, their numbers had been increasing steadily since 1879, until the population had risen from 736 in that year to 1,019 in 1898-about the same number who had come down from Crow Creek and up from Davenport thirty-two years earlier. Educationally they had progressed far in those years. Not only did they enjoy the facilities of the Santee Normal Training School and the Santee Industrial School, but by the middle nineties contracts were being made with school districts in Knox County, and Santee children were sharing classrooms with white children. But they were as far as ever from self-sufficiency and in many respects were retrograding. Worst of all, the Indian Bureau and ____________________ 59 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1896, p. 205; 1897, p. 184. 60 Helms to Morgan, July 19, 1892, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1894, p. 193; 1896, pp. 41, 202 ; 1898, p. 332 ; 1900, p. 280. -196-
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