Henry Sibley and the U. S.-Dakota War of 1862. Rhoda R. Gilman

      © 2012 by Rhoda R. Gilman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

      This e-short is excerpted and adapted from Rhoda R. Gilman, Henry Hastings Sibley: Divided Heart (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2004).

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      The Minnesota Historical Society Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

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      ISBN: 978-0-87351-878-9 (e-book)

      Chapter 1

      The Setting

      Henry Hastings Sibley came to Minnesota in 1834. Born of New England ancestry in the frontier fur trade mecca of Detroit, he was twenty-three years old and a rising star in the American Fur Company. By that time, however, the North American fur trade was in its final years. The tide of European migration had already swept across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Mississippi Valley. Land, not trade, was the prize that drew the endless army of settlers and sodbusters. They saw themselves not as conquerors but as a legion bringing civilization and the light of true religion to a wilderness and its “savage” inhabitants.

      Sibley was assigned to trade with the Dakota people. As early as 1805, the Dakota agreed to let the United States build a fort at the mouth of the Minnesota River, and in the 1820s they watched the fort be built and garrisoned with white troops. Except for the military reservation around it, no Dakota land had yet been taken, but in 1837 the tribe’s two eastern bands—Mdewakanton and Wahpekute—signed a treaty that gave up their claims to everything east of the Mississippi River. But that was not enough for white settlers. Soon, white settlers on farms and in small towns on the river’s east side began to look longingly at Indian land on the western bank.

      The years between 1840 and 1842 were a pivotal time in the life of Henry Sibley. He was an avid hunter who loved adventuring on the unspoiled prairies of western Minnesota and northern Iowa. In the fall and winter of 1840–41 he lived for several months with a Dakota band engaged in its winter hunt, and a few months later he became the father of a Dakota daughter. The year 1841 also saw the signing of a treaty that held out the flickering hope of a dramatically different future for the upper Mississippi region. Known as the Doty treaty, it would have turned the Dakota country from the Mississippi west to the James River into an all-Indian territory from which white settlers were excluded. Not only the Dakota but other Indian tribes would have been given permanent homes there, and eventually it would have become an Indian-governed state.

      Sibley was enthusiastic about the plan, writing that no other treaty had been “better calculated for securing the interests of the Indians and of the people in the country.” Apparently the Dakota thought so too, for they signed it immediately. The treaty was doomed, however, in the U.S. Senate. Although Sibley himself spent nearly four months lobbying in Washington, it was overwhelmingly defeated. Clearly, no barrier would ever be raised to protect Indian possession of the land. Twelve days later the American Fur Company closed.

      Sibley and his partner, Hercules Dousman of Prairie du Chien, continued in the fur trade for a few more years, supplied by the Chouteau Company of St. Louis, but both men could see that it was a losing business. The future lay with white settlement and development of the country, so they began to invest in land, lumber, and steamboats. Sibley turned to politics, but his lobbying was more successful in creating a new Minnesota Territory than it had been in ratifying the Doty treaty. The payoff was his election as delegate to Congress.

      During his four years in Congress, from 1849 to 1853, Sibley felt conflicted. Like most Americans of his generation, he was intensely patriotic. He accepted conquest of the west as divinely ordained and his duty to the United States as a sacred obligation. Nevertheless, his own human sympathy, his awareness of government duplicity, and his love for the land and its vanishing past left him with a divided heart and a troubled conscience.

      In the summer of 1850 he delivered a blistering speech to Congress on the subject of its corrupt and ruthless Indian policy. That policy, he said, had consistently led to extermination of Indian people. He predicted that history would in time “do justice to the heroic bands who have struggled so fiercely to preserve their lands and the graves of their fathers from the grasping hand of the white man.” In closing, he told the congressmen that the remaining tribes were being encircled “as with a wall of fire,” and unless there was a change, the country “must very soon suffer the consequences of a bloody and remorseless Indian war.”

      Even as he spoke, Sibley faced a bitter dilemma: his success depended on the very system he deplored. Among the voters of Minnesota Territory, popular demand for opening up the land across the river had become deafening. Meanwhile, Sibley himself had lost money in the fur trade, and he owed more to Chouteau and the bankrupt American Fur Company than he could ever recover—unless the Dakota paid their debts to him from treaty money. Congress frowned on spelling out that kind of payment in a treaty, but there were ways to achieve it. Both Sibley’s political career and his personal solvency were at stake.

      Without doubt, there had to be a treaty, and Sibley was the key man to set it up. In doing so, he navigated a complex network of power relationships, for both sides were divided, with different factions demanding different things. Standing behind Sibley, both pushing and supporting him, was Alexander Ramsey, the territory’s tough young governor. Short of Congress, Ramsey held final government authority over Indian affairs in Minnesota, and his political future was on the line no less than Sibley’s. A more uncertain element was Henry M. Rice, a onetime business associate of Sibley and also his rival for leadership of Minnesota Democrats. Altogether, the land-grab took more than three years and resulted in two similar treaties.

      Negotiating separately with the upper and lower bands of Dakota was part of Sibley’s strategy. The two upper (western) bands—Sisseton and Wahpeton—had endured several hard years, and many of them were near starvation. They looked to treaty payments for survival. The lower (eastern) bands were still receiving payments from the treaty of 1837 and were far less persuadable. Once the western bands had sold their land, however, the eastern bands would be surrounded by white settlers and under great pressure to do the same.

      Another division among the Dakota that worked to Sibley’s advantage was the large population of mixed-blood people. They could not legally participate in treaties, but they had great influence with their relatives who did. Many of them had been engaged in the fur trade, and some powerful families, like the Faribaults, the Renvilles, the Provencalles, and the Laframboise, had been employed by Sibley and hoped to benefit from treaty money. Even white traders like Joseph R. Brown, who was Sibley’s closest business and political friend, had married into the tribe and were therefore trusted by its members. Sibley himself acknowledged and supported his Dakota daughter, Helen, but he had married Sarah Jane Steele, a sister of the Fort Snelling sutler, and was raising a white family.

      Yet a third division had been created by the work of Christian missionaries like Stephen R. Riggs, Dr. Thomas S. Williamson, and the Pond brothers. While not many Dakota had converted, a number had been influenced by the teachings toward abandoning their traditional way of life and taking up farming along with other European customs. They were bitterly scorned by those who clung to ancestral Dakota ways, but most of them, like the missionaries, argued in favor of a treaty.

      On the white side there were also divisions. The fat pot