Henry Sibley and the U. S.-Dakota War of 1862. Rhoda R. Gilman
all around the Midwest to try getting their hands into it. Most powerful were the Ewing brothers of Indiana and Ohio, who had close connections in Washington and had financed one or two small independent traders who competed with Sibley. From the initial appointment of treaty commissioners to the final investigation of the payment two years later, the Ewings schemed and raised barriers to get a share of the money.
Even more of a threat was the growing division in the U.S. Senate between free and slave states. A treaty that opened the rich prairies of southern Minnesota to northern farmers and new immigrants would soon lead to another free state knocking at the door of the nation. Southern senators could see that. Unable to defeat the treaty outright, they tried to amend it to death, and they nearly succeeded.
The first and most colorful chapter in the story was played out at Traverse des Sioux in the summer of 1851. There, the two upper bands signed away their land except for a narrow reservation along the upper Minnesota River. They also signed a separate “traders paper” that gave a cash sum of some $210,000 to traders and mixed-blood relatives. At Mendota a few days later, a parallel treaty was signed with the lower bands, whose reservation would be along the river just below that of the upper bands. As expected, there was more opposition among the Mdewakanton, but the tipping point came when Chief Little Crow (Taoyateduta) defied the restless young men of the band to shoot him as he strode up to the table and signed the paper.
The drama then moved to Washington, where senators voted a number of amendments. The most important eliminated the reservations, leaving the Dakota to go wherever the president chose to put them. It led Chief Wabasha to declare, “There is one thing more which our great father can do, that is, gather us all together on the prairie and surround us with soldiers and shoot us down.” Nevertheless the Dakota signed the rewritten treaty. Ramsey promised them that the president would let them live on the reservation already agreed on, and the upper bands gave Ramsey their power of attorney, thinking, apparently, that this revoked the traders paper they had signed. Ramsey thought otherwise, and since payment of the money was in his hands, he controlled the situation.
Back in Washington, the Ewings claimed that there had been fraud in cheating them out of money the upper bands had agreed to pay them. Sibley immediately demanded an investigation of the charge. Although the final report judged that the treaty had not been scrupulously followed, it cleared Ramsey of malfeasance, and the Ewings withdrew their claim. So southern Minnesota was taken from the Dakota in a cloud of deceit and broken promises, leading Dousman to observe, “The Sioux treaty will hang like a curse over our heads the balance of our lives.” He was right.
As white men carved up the land and jockeyed for possession of its riches, the Dakota slowly made their way toward the area designated for them along the Minnesota River. Although the tribe still had no assurance that they could occupy the reservation permanently, Governor Willis A. Gorman, who had replaced Ramsey in 1853, directed them to move, and the new occupants of their previous homes added other forms of persuasion. At Red Wing, the Dakota village mysteriously burned while the band was absent on a hunt. Sibley tried to intervene on behalf of the small Wahpekute band, telling Gorman that some of them wanted to live beside the Cannon River and adopt the ways of white men, but he was unsuccessful.
The payments to traders and mixed-bloods listed in the traders papers had been taken from a cash “subsistence fund” included in the treaty that was intended to pay expenses of resettling the Dakota in their new homes. But that fund was depleted, and the Dakota were in urgent need of their first annuities, due in July 1853. Not until November, after they were assembled at the reservation, was a partial payment made. Since none of the housing, roads, or other improvements promised by the treaty had appeared, the bands scattered again to their old localities for a winter of hunting and meager subsistence.
This scene continued through most of the 1850s. Improvements lagged, Congress failed to appropriate money to meet treaty payments in full, and delivery of supplies was inadequate and nearly always late. Thus the Dakota had little choice but to seek game and other food where they could find it. Nevertheless, as the country became dotted with farms, settlers were often indignant about the presence of Indian hunters far from their reservation.
When asked by an eastern editor about the fate of the Indians, Sibley wrote in 1856, “Turn to the history of the Six Nations and of the other bands whose graves are numberless on both sides of the Alleghanies and you will need but little aid from the imagination.” It was, he said, the old story of broken treaties and betrayed promises, and the Dakota “can look for no redress of their grievances on this side of the ‘spirit land.’”
Meanwhile, Sibley’s business interests had turned to townsite promotion and railroads in the booming market of the 1850s. Although his trade in furs had long since ended, he continued to serve as agent for the Chouteau Company in its Minnesota land investments. He declined to run again for Congress, but he maintained his leadership in what was becoming the independent antislavery wing of Minnesota’s Democratic Party. His longtime rival Henry Rice continued in close alliance with the pro-southern administration of President James Buchanan. With ever-growing tension in the country over slavery and the approach of statehood in 1857, Sibley chaired the Democratic twin of Minnesota’s two constitutional conventions. That fall he was elected to be the state’s first governor in anticipation of immediate admission to the union.
The same year saw several changes for the Dakota. In the spring of 1857, the settlements in southwestern Minnesota were terrorized by a small band of outlaw Wahpekute who had separated years before from the main tribe. After the outlaw Wahpekute killed isolated farmers near Spirit Lake and along the upper Des Moines River, the government spent months in futile pursuit, making unwarranted threats to the rest of the tribe. These efforts only demonstrated the inability of the U.S. Army and the Indian Department to cope with the situation.
Later that summer, Charles E. Flandreau, the government agent for the Dakota, was appointed to the territorial Supreme Court and soon after that was elected chief justice of the new state. Sibley’s old friend Joseph R. Brown fell heir to the coveted political appointment as federal Indian agent. Brown’s tenure, along with a renewed missionary effort, brought rapid change. His wife, Susan Frenier Brown, was a Sisseton mixed-blood. He knew the Dakota, and he knew how to work the system at the Indian Office. Despite his history as a trader, speculator, and notorious whiskey seller, Brown accepted the policy laid out by the missionaries and implemented it effectively. Homes were built, fields were plowed, and the Upper and Lower Sioux Agencies, which served the two divisions of the tribe, began to take on the look of small villages, with government warehouses, blacksmith shops, mills, and schools.
This very progress, however, polarized the Dakota. Led by the older chiefs, Wabasha and Wacouta, a large part of the tribe recognized the inevitable need for adapting, and now that they had the chance, they moved quickly to do so. Traditionalists, along with many of the younger men who saw change threatening their honored status as hunters and warriors, fiercely opposed the Indian farmers who adopted European clothing, schooling, and in some cases Christianity. Traditional attitudes were reinforced by frequent contact with Yankton and Yanktonais tribesmen, who still lived as free buffalo hunters in the Missouri River valley. Soon the young men began to form soldiers lodges. Although these were based on a temporary form of policing organization that had customarily been adopted for hunting and warfare, they took on a new and more permanent cast as a secret network of militants pledged to upholding the tribe’s ancient rituals and social customs.
Early in 1858, Brown and the Indian Office also acted to clarify the uncertain legal status of the reservation. A group of chiefs and headmen taken to Washington signed a treaty in June that year. By that treaty, the Dakota gave up the half of their reservation that lay north of the Minnesota River and agreed to allotment of individual, privately owned farms from the remaining land. As the pressure against ancient communal customs and group identities thus increased, so did tension within the tribe. Hostility toward farmer Indians escalated into harassment, destruction of property, and frequent threats of violence. Some of the anger in the soldiers lodges also spilled over onto the barns and livestock of settlers who were hurriedly staking claims to the ceded lands just north of the river.
Statehood for Minnesota was delayed by eight months because of the standoff between slave and free states, so when Sibley finally