Henry Sibley and the U. S.-Dakota War of 1862. Rhoda R. Gilman
in the presidential race of 1860, Lincoln would take Minnesota. As the southern states seceded and war began in 1861, Sibley, unlike many other leading Minnesotans, did not seek a prestigious military appointment. Instead, at age fifty, he looked forward to a quiet retirement with his family at Mendota. Already, a year earlier, he had briefly become a grandfather, when his Dakota daughter, Helen, who had married a young Wisconsin doctor and moved to Milwaukee, bore her first child. Within days after the birth, both Helen and the baby died.
As yet there was no civil service system, so a change in party control meant a wholesale turnover in federal jobs. The Republican takeover after eight years of Democratic rule in Washington had an immediate effect on Minnesota’s Indian affairs. Already notorious for corruption, the Indian Office was well known as a place to make an easy fortune. Thus Democrats were summarily turned out and Republicans named, regardless of experience or competence. Early in 1861, the Dakota saw Brown replaced as their agent by Thomas J. Galbraith, a stubborn man with a drinking habit and contempt for Indians. The results turned a tense situation into a disaster.
When Galbraith arrived at the Lower Agency in May to take up his new duties, he found boiling resentment over the treaty signed in 1858. Two years had passed before it was ratified. During that time, settlers crowded into what had been reservation land across the Minnesota River, partly cutting off Dakota access to former hunting grounds to the north and east. Assured that they would receive a fair price, the Dakota had left the exact sum to be named by the Senate. A fair price, according to Agent Brown was $5.00 per acre; the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs recommended $1.25; the Senate as a whole fixed on thirty cents. Expecting an adequate sum, the Dakota had agreed to pay their debts to the traders then doing business on the reservation. During the two-year delay, those debts continued to climb, and by the time the meager treaty money arrived in 1861, the lower bands found that all of it was paid directly to the traders.
Meanwhile the rift within the tribe continued to widen, and Galbraith’s policies hastened the process. He openly favored the farmers, both with annuity money and in other ways. In both the upper and lower bands, anger mounted among young members of the soldiers lodges. Continuing to meet in secret, they dominated and intimidated others and helped to stimulate a revival of traditional spiritual practices in opposition to the missionaries. Among the upper bands, many farmers left their fields in fear for their lives, and troops were needed to keep the peace at the annuity payment in 1861. A poor corn crop that year was followed by a severe winter and a spring of grim hunger.
Rumors circulated that the embattled U.S. government would be unable to make its promised payments. Some supplies arrived that spring when navigation opened in 1862, and government warehouses at the two agencies were partly stocked. The cash annuities, however, were delayed, week after week. Traders had supplies on hand, but they refused to extend more credit, fearful that Indian anger would prevent their payment from the annuity money. As tension mounted, Galbraith summoned troops and waited. At last, early in August, an armed confrontation with some 500 Sisseton and Wahpeton forced him to open the warehouse at the Upper Agency. Their demands for food met, the Dakota dispersed, and the troops headed back to Fort Ripley.
Among the lower bands, there was less hunger and open hostility but no less anger. The young zealots of the soldiers lodge shared with each other their fury and frustration, but leadership was lacking—and so were voices of moderation. The erosion of traditional roles and social institutions under reservation conditions weakened the influence of even the most respected chiefs. Several of them had joined the farmers, and others remained silent. The women of the tribe, who in a strong communal society could speak with a unified voice, were also silenced by separation onto family farmsteads and division caused by missionary teachings.
The ground was shifting elsewhere, too. The Great White Father no longer commanded monolithic authority. News of defeat and stalemate on southern battlefields circulated among the bands, carried by literate mixed-bloods and government employees. In fact, Galbraith himself had been busy recruiting volunteers from among the many mixed-blood men on the reservation for a corps of scouts and sharpshooters to aid the Union Army. On August 16 he left the Lower Agency, headed for Fort Snelling with his small force of “Renville Rangers.”
The next day four young Mdewakanton men returning from a hunting expedition north of the Minnesota River began to dispute their relative bravery and daring. The stakes escalated until at last, in a show of bravado, they shot four white settlers. Fleeing to their village, which was a stronghold of the soldiers lodge, they begged for protection. Intense discussions followed, centering on the undoubted fact that the entire band would be punished for the crime. Others were called in, and there was a rising wave of sentiment in favor of immediate war. At last, in the middle of the night, they decided to appeal to Little Crow.
Taoyateduta, who had defied threats of death to sign the treaty of Mendota, had also been a leader in negotiating the 1858 treaty. His readiness to deal with the government despite its repeated betrayal of solemn agreements had damaged his prestige with the tribe. Nevertheless, he was the one leader who retained credibility with both groups among the divided Mdewakanton. Although he spoke some English, lived in a government-built house, and was willing to wear European clothing on occasion, he clung strongly to Dakota religious beliefs and resisted becoming a farmer. His ambivalence was symbolized by a tall tipi standing beside the brick house in which his family lived.
It was in this tipi that an agonizing confrontation took place in the predawn hours of August 18, 1862. After listening to the story of the young men and the harangues of their supporters, Little Crow blackened his face as if in mourning and covered his head. At last someone hurled an accusation of cowardice. Springing to his feet, the chief retorted with a powerful recital of the utter hopelessness of war against the whites. Then he concluded, “Braves, you are little children—you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in January.—Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.”
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