Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota

Mni Sota Makoce is a rich and diverse land that gave birth to the Dakota people eons ago. As the mother and grandmother of the Dakota people, it has sustained them for countless generations. For the Dakota the land was animate, a relative, a mother. When Dakota people greet each other they often say, as Dakota historian Chris Mato Nunpa did at the beginning of a 2006 article, “Hau Mitakuyapi. Owasin cantewasteya nape ciyuzapi do!” This means, “Hello my relatives. With a good heart I greet you all with a handshake.” Particularly important in this greeting is the term mitakuyapi, or “all my relatives,” which acknowledges the central place the Dakota’s sense of living in deep and extended kinship with each other has in their culture, a meaning close to their hearts. This kinship leads Dakota to accept the obligation of attending to the well-being of their relations in a way that defines them in their interactions with each other and the land. For them, to carry out this obligation they are called upon to embody wo ohoda (respect) in their actions. This expresses a deep and pervasive sense of respect for the bonds of kinship that starts with the land that gave them birth and is their home. It is in this context that we must understand the way in which the Dakota had their lands taken from them. In the nineteenth century the Dakota were asked to sell the land and make way for its possession by another people. In the process, the deep roots of Dakota identity in Mni Sota Makoce suffered a tragic wound as the Dakota were physically driven from their homelands. This wound is carried by many Dakota people today.¹

In the nineteenth century a process began through which the Dakota were dispossessed of their Minnesota homelands. Between 1805 and 1858, a period of fifty-three years, twelve treaties were concluded between the Dakota and the United States. These treaties, as understood and acted upon by the United States, had a dramatic impact on the relationship of the Dakota people with their ancestral lands in Minnesota. Where once they had ranged across the entire territory of what would become the state of Minnesota, by 1858 they had been physically confined to a small reservation ten miles wide, running 140 miles along the south shore of the Minnesota River from just east of Lake Traverse to just west of the site of the city of New Ulm.

The negotiation of these treaties was not a clear-cut process or one easily categorized. Collectively these treaties included three great cessions, comprising the Treaties of 1825, 1837, and 1851. But to call these agreements cessions is to privilege the nonindigenous side of the negotiating table. For the Dakota the word cessions might well be replaced with seizures, because of the stark contrast between the Dakota views of land and that of government negotiators, not to mention the dubious process through which these treaties were written, negotiated, and carried out.

The Dakota people and the government agents who negotiated and signed the treaties had radically different points of view about their meaning. Without understanding these differences, anything said about the treaties can be nothing more than a European projection of a far different story about the land that masks the true identity of the Dakota people. Both the Dakota and the Europeans have an intense and intimate relationship with the land, but that relationship springs from strikingly different sources of understanding. Dakota people view the land as their homeland, their relative, their mother; the Europeans see it as a possession.

Out of these two vastly different understandings have come two equally different master stories—the great stories by which a community names and explains itself and its members. The two master stories of the Dakota people and the recent European immigrants to Mni Sota who called themselves “Americans” clashed at the treaty-making table in the nineteenth century, with tragic consequences that continue down to the present day.

In a European American view, the story of the treaties between the United States and the Dakota Oyate or Nation—in individual treaties with various of the Oc̣eti Ṡaḳowiŋ, or Seven Fires—is often told as the story of U.S. westward expansion through the extension of American dominion over the Dakota homeland. This is the American story of “how the west was won and held” through warfare and politics and through the spread of European-style agriculture, forestry, mining, and urban settlement, along with the market-based commercialism that accompanied these activities. The American story also tells how, in the face of this wave of activity breaking over their homelands, Indian people were forced into a smaller and smaller territory and a correspondingly smaller range of activity on the land as they were cut off from the game and plant resources that sustained their traditional way of life. Ultimately, native people were physically separated from their homeland and confined to the small scattered areas chosen by the Europeans and called “reservations.”

Stories and Master Stories

[ HOWARD J. VOGEL ] Why focus on stories? Because stories are important. People grow up and live their lives hearing and telling stories. Sometimes people find that they are changed by new stories or old stories retold in a new way. Stories are bearers of truth, which is, in the words of Thomas King, “the truth about stories.” In hearing and telling stories, human beings participate in an experience that occurs in cultures across the ages, though it varies widely among individuals and peoples. Stories can be entertainment, but they can also tell us who we are—as individuals and as a people—what is true, and what we are called to do in our engagement with the world in which we live.ⁱ

Master stories are the great stories by which a community names itself and its members. They are the stories through which groups of people come to understand reality and what is of ultimate importance. Master stories often include myths of origin as well as features of individual and community identity. The norms of the community are undergirded by these stories and give them, and the community, shape, meaning, and identity. Master stories are narratives rooted in the historical experience of a people and provide a context for understanding themselves and the world they encounter as well as guidance for how they live their lives. Out of these stories come the distinctive features of individual and collective identity shared by those who are members of a particular culture. The stories both give rise to the norms of the community and provide a resource for their application. These stories are told and retold down through the ages as a central vehicle for cultural transmission and identity. In this dynamic way the master stories are foundational as well as life giving within the tradition that holds them dear.

When two very different peoples meet on the same land, there is always the potential for one master story to become dominant in the relationship that develops between them. And when one people impose their master story on another people in the name of the state, there is the great danger that the subordinated peoples’ cultural heritage will be extinguished along with their story. In such situations, the master stories of the other are often obliterated when they come into conflict with the “imperial story” of the dominant culture.

This happens because master stories are not neutral. They embrace and express a particular understanding of reality and are deeply value laden: they can be either “hegemonic tales,” enforcing a “colonizing consciousness” designed to erase a peoples’ connection to their culture and their communities, or “subversive stories,” restoring that connection.ⁱⁱ

When such stories come into conflict with the state today, before a court or other governmental decision-making body, the master story of the Dakota that lies at the heart of these conflicts is likely to be given short shrift or ignored altogether, while the American story is likely to dominate the way the dispute is framed for the purpose of governmental decision-making. Thus, an understanding of master stories is especially important when reading and interpreting the meaning of laws and treaties, especially when it relates to ordering the relationship between two different peoples living on the same land. In courts of law and at treaty negotiating tables, these stories can be seen in action, shaping the results and the way those results are carried out. The master stories are both explicit and implicit, underlying the language used, the discourse of those involved, and the actions taken later. Until we consider all the stories, how they clash with one another and how the conflict between them is finally resolved, the story we call “history” is incomplete.

Often the reservations were marked out on the least desirable land from a European American point of view. These often desolate lands lacked the resources by which the native people could live as they always had and thus compromised not only their sustenance but also their survival as a distinct people. Meanwhile, the European Americans set about to “improve” the rich land which, in their view, had been wasted by the native people. Treaties played a crucial role in the increasing separation of the Dakota from their homeland in the years between 1805 and 1858, leading up to their ultimate expulsion by military force in 1863–64.

The Americans’ exercise of dominion over the Dakota homeland under the treaties concluded in the nineteenth century is both a product and an expression of the European Doctrine of Discovery that goes back to a series of Papal bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI in the late fifteenth century. In 1493, the year after Columbus “discovered” America, the pope issued the bull entitled In caetera Divinae, dividing the earth’s continents between Portugal and Spain. Under this bull, America was granted to Spain. It was based, in part, on Pope Innocent IV’s thirteenth-century legal commentary on an earlier decree by Pope Innocent III justifying the Christian Crusades undertaken between 1096 and 1271. The Discovery Doctrine’s foundation, under which dominion of the Christian nations of Europe was extended over the non-Christian nations of Europe and elsewhere, is rooted in the much earlier eleventh-century pronouncements on the crusades which themselves emerged from the imperial church established by Constantine after his Edict of Milan tolerating Christianity in 313. The end of persecution of the early Christian movement laid the cornerstone for the imperial church that would eventually usher in the Doctrine of Discovery. It facilitated the spread of European Christian nations’ dominion over land where such dominion had not previously existed by laying down the principle that once dominion was established by one Christian nation over such lands no other Christian nation could exercise the same right.²

1493

The year after Columbus “discovered” America, the pope issues the bull entitled In caetera Divinae, dividing the continents of the earth between Portugal and Spain, one of a series of Papal bulls creating a European Doctrine of Discovery.

The Discovery Doctrine sparked a race among the Christian nations of Europe to “discover” and “claim” lands over which no Christian nation had previously exercised dominion. Explorers set off across the seas and upon landing in new lands would, Bible in hand, plant the flags of their ruler and claim the lands against any declarations that might be subsequently made by other Christian nations. Understood from a European perspective, the doctrine authorized the “discovering” Christian nations to exercise dominion by virtue of what came to be viewed as the conquest of the non-Christian inhabitants found in the new lands. Discovery and conquest went hand in hand, laying a supposed legal foundation for the spread of European empire upon the distant lands of North America and beyond. The Discovery Doctrine provided the basis for Spanish, French, and English land claims in North America and for carving up the “discovered” land between these three European sovereign powers. Even though it was questioned by the Spanish priest Franciscus de Victoria, who in 1532 challenged the power of the Spanish crown to simply seize the indigenous peoples’ land without their consent, the conquering thrust unleashed in the fifteenth century with papal approval continued to inform the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. Eventually the Discovery Doctrine became the source of authority for non-Spanish European colonization of North America, and with the coming of the American Revolution eventually was embraced as legal precedent within the domestic law of the United States.³

1532

The Spanish priest Franciscus de Victoria challenges the power of the Spanish crown to simply seize the land of the indigenous peoples without their consent, but his views are largely ignored.

1689

Nicolas Perrot leads a ceremony to take possession, in the name of Louis XIV, of the entire Upper Mississippi region.

The first recorded statement of a claim for the Dakota homeland in Minnesota was made under the Doctrine of Discovery in a “Minute of the taking of possession of the country of the Upper Mississippi” to include “the country of the Nadouesioux, the rivers Ste Croix and Ste Peter [later called the Minnesota River] and other places more remote,” by Nicolas Perrot on May 8, 1689. Perrot’s document was noted in the presence of several witnesses whose names are recorded and includes the fact that he had traveled “to the Country of the Nadouesioux on the border of the River Saint Croix and at the mouth of the River Saint Peter, on the bank of which were the Mantantans [sometimes called the Mdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ], and farther up into the interior to the North east of the Mississippi as far as the Menchokatoux with whom dwell the majority of the Songeskitons and other Nadoussioux, who are to the North east of the Mississippi, to take possession for, and in the name of the King [of France], of the countries and rivers inhabited by the said Tribes and of which they are proprietors.”⁴

1763

The first Treaty of Paris ends the French and Indian War or Seven Years’ War, officially transferring French claims to the Upper Mississippi region to the British.

1783

The second Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain and its former colonies, which become the United States, laying the groundwork for transferring British claims to the Minnesota region.

Perrot’s authority for taking possession comes not from any acquiescence on the part of the Dakota or other native peoples but directly and entirely from European law and the Doctrine of Discovery, which justified the occupation of non-Christian lands. After the American Colonies broke from Britain in 1776 and the United States was established as a separate nation in 1781, the Americans increasingly became the successor beneficiaries to the perquisites gained in North America by the European Christian nations of Spain, France, and Britain under the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, an American version of the Doctrine of Discovery that envisioned westward expansion across the content, fueled extension of American dominion over indigenous land in the nineteenth century as the frontier of the new nation moved ever westward. Thus the idea that land can and is to be organized under the possession of one owner to the exclusion of all others, an old European idea that now came into American legal usage through English common law, led directly to the Louisiana Purchase of the remaining French territory west of the Mississippi River, including a portion of present-day Minnesota.

1789

The U.S. Constitution is ratified; Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 asserts that Congress has the power to regulate commerce with Indian tribes and that treaties with tribes are the “supreme law of the land.”

The Louisiana Purchase came about through a treaty concluded between France and the United States in Paris on April 30, 1803. By its terms France transferred to the United States 529,911,680 acres in exchange for fifteen million dollars. Following ratification of the treaty, President Thomas Jefferson was duly authorized under the established principles of domestic and international law to take possession of the newly acquired land in the name of the United States and to establish a temporary military government there. On March 10, 1804, formal ownership of Louisiana was transferred from France to the United States at a ceremony conducted in St. Louis. With this transfer the U.S. land mass doubled overnight, with the Dakota nation finding itself, without knowledge or consent, a “captive nation” within the expanded boundaries over which the United States now exercised dominion. Over the next fifty-four years, the U.S. government would negotiate with the Dakota to obtain legal ownership of all of their lands in this region to facilitate its formal transfer, parcel by parcel, to immigrant settlers under the Anglo-American rules of property law.⁵

1803

The Louisiana Territory, including the area of Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, is purchased from France for fifteen million dollars.

In this way the United States became the successor to the Europeans who first brought the Discovery Doctrine to North America. Subsequently, this doctrine provided the basis for the U.S. Supreme Court to hold that under American law the land and sovereignty of the indigenous peoples was limited. The court took this position in a series of cases known as the Marshall Trilogy after Chief Justice John Marshall. While native peoples residing on their homelands within the expanding territorial boundaries of the United States had the right to use and occupy these lands, they no longer had the power to convey title to them. That title now rested in the United States and any of its successors to whom the land might be transferred or sold under established principles of real property law imported to the United States from England. In addition, the court held that while the “Indian nations” had some limited sovereignty to govern affairs on the land on which they resided, they did so at the pleasure and subject to the “plenary power” of Congress. Congress could, if it so chose, have the last word on how affairs were to be governed within the communities of Indian nations on their homelands. Indian nations were now defined as “domestic dependent nations,” captive within the territorial boundaries of the United States, able to exercise a limited amount of sovereignty with which the individual states could not interfere but which Congress could at any time alter by legislative action.⁶

From this understanding developed the Trust Doctrine, under which the federal government was held to have certain duties toward Indian nations as a guardian does to a ward, the Indian peoples being regarded as in a state of “pupilage.” The European master story viewed the indigenous peoples within the United States as defeated nations whose communities were thought to be the diminishing vestiges of a primitive, childlike, savage, warlike, and heathen race that would soon vanish from the face of the earth and/or be fully assimilated into the Christian Euro-American culture that had discovered and conquered them. This master story justified the American nation’s claim to dominion over their land, and with it the power to distribute the “free” land to the flood of European immigrants coming to the so-called new world to claim it. The indigenous people would be reduced to a small number, and their culture would disappear through assimilation. Or so it was thought.⁷

But this is not the only way to tell the story, and in fact it is far from complete in many senses, including a legal one. In the first place, the native peoples did not disappear, nor did their culture. Their stories of the land and the language in which those stories were told was severely stressed but not defeated, and they did not vanish as expected. In the second place, the legal assumptions that bolstered the European story were changing. The U.S. Supreme Court developed what are known as the Rules of Sympathetic Construction of Indian Treaties, a protocol for judges who interpret the treaties in cases that come before the courts. These rules recognize the disadvantage of the Indians engaged at the treaty-making table and try to compensate in the judicial interpretation of the treaties. The most important of these rules are that treaties between the United States and the Indian nations are to be (1) liberally construed in favor of the Indians “in a spirit which generously recognizes the full obligation of this nation to protect the interests of a dependent people”; (2) “in accordance with the meaning they were understood to have by the tribal representatives who participated in their negotiation” by “look[ing] beyond the written words to the larger context that frames the Treaty, including the history of the treaty, the negotiations, and the practical construction adopted by the parties”; (3) with ambiguities resolved in favor of the Indians.⁸

Under the Rules of Sympathetic Construction comes to light a Dakota narrative markedly different from the American narrative about the nature and function of land. When both points of view at the treaty table are understood and considered, what emerges is a complex and larger story of the negotiations as a dramatic clash of master stories evolving over the fifty-three-year span of treaty making between the Dakota and the United States, in which contrasting views of land were opposed one to the other.

It should also be noted that there were several distinctive subtexts within each of the master stories. Within the American narrative, the interests of traders, missionaries, government officials, and real-estate speculators became part and parcel of what happened at the treaty table. So did the differing points of view between Dakota traditionalists and those more willing to accept change in reaction to European American patterns of life on the frontier. These subtexts at the treaty table became a source of conflict within each of the narratives themselves. Individuals with vested interests in the treaties, such as fur traders, played prominent roles in preparations leading up to negotiations as well in the negotiations and subsequent ratification process, and the treaties became the source of internal conflicts and double-dealing by many of those involved.

In September 1805 Lieutenant Zebulon Pike arrived at the island (later known as Pike Island) at the mouth of the Minnesota River at the place the Dakota called Bdote. Pike was greeted by C̣etaŋ Wakuwa Mani, also known as Petit Corbeau or Little Crow, the leader of the Kap’oża village, with a hundred and fifty warriors. The day after he arrived, on September 23, Pike, representing the United States, and the leaders of two local Dakota villages met on the island to conclude a treaty between the United States and the “Nation of Sioux Indians,” a term used to refer to the Dakota and other groups making up the Oc̣eti Ṡaḳowiŋ, or Seven Fires.⁹

The Dakota signers were C̣etaŋ Wakuwa Mani and Way Aga Enogee, Waŋyaga Inażiŋ (He Sees Standing Up), the chief known as Fils de Penishon, whose village was located on the lower Minnesota River.

By the wording of the treaty, the so-called Sioux Nation granted to the United States “for the purpose of the Establishment of Military Posts” two pieces of land, one at the mouth of the St. Croix River, the other to include land from below the mouth of the St. Peters or Minnesota River to the Falls of St. Anthony. According to Article 1, “the Sioux Nation grants to the United States, the full sovereignty and power over said districts forever, without any let or hindrance whatsoever.” As consideration for these grants Pike intended that the United States would pay something, but he left this line blank in the treaty. Additionally, the United States promised “to permit the Sioux to pass, repass, hunt or make other uses of the said districts, as they have formerly done, without any other exception, but those specified in article first.” In securing the agreement of the Dakota present at the council to establish military posts, Pike fulfilled specific orders for his expedition.¹⁰

On the matter of the land’s value to the United States omitted in Article 2, Pike noted in his journal that he received on behalf of the United States “about 100,000 Acres (equal to 200,000 Dollars).” Pike also reported that on the day of the council “I gave them presents to the amount of about 200 dollars, and as soon as the Council was over, I suffered the Traders [who, Pike wrote, appeared at the council as “my Gentlemen”] to present them with some liquor, which, with what I myself gave, was equal to 60 gallons.”¹¹

The Senate did not take up the treaty until it was sent to them by President Thomas Jefferson in 1808, when they filled in the blank of Article 2 with the following language: “The United States shall, prior to taking possession thereof, pay to the Sioux two thousand dollars, or deliver the value thereof in such goods and merchandise as they shall choose.” In making this recommendation the Senate was following a committee report that put the amount of land “ceded by the Sioux” at the mouth of the St. Croix at 51,840 acres and that between St. Anthony Falls and the mouth of the Minnesota at 103,680 acres, for a total of 155,520 acres. The report went on to calculate that two thousand dollars amounted to “one cent and twenty-eight mills the acre.”¹²

Although President Jefferson sent the treaty to the Senate, once it was ratified he never proclaimed it, the usual final step in the process. Charles J. Kappler, who compiled the definitive collection of all treaties concluded by the United States with the various Indian nations, noted, “examination of the records of the State Department fails to indicate any subsequent action by the President [following Senate approval] in proclaiming the ratification of this treaty; but more than twenty-five years subsequent to its approval by the Senate the correspondence of the War Department speaks of the cessions of land described therein as an accomplished fact.”¹³

The documentary record of the 1805 treaty and its subsequent implementation gives some evidence of the clash of master stories at the treaty table, although exactly how Dakota leaders understood the treaty terms has never been completely explained. Did they appreciate the phrase “full sovereignty and power”? How was the word grant translated to them? What did they think the treaties were meant to accomplish?

Clues may be found not just in the treaty itself but in accounts of the council that took place to negotiate it and in the words and behavior of the Dakota in the years that followed. In his journal Pike stated that other Sioux chiefs were present at the treaty council, including Le Grand Partisan (possibly Wanataŋ), Le Orignal Levé (Rising or Standing Moose), Le Demi Douzen (Half Dozen or Six, Ṡakp̣e), Le Becasse (possibly a mistake for Bras Cassé, Broken Arm), and Le Boeuf qui Marche (Walking Buffalo). Pike stated that “it was somewhat difficult to get them to sign the grant, as they conceived the word of honor should be taken for the Grant, without any mark; but I convinced them that, not on their account but my own I wanted them to sign.” Some later Dakota statements about the treaty seem to suggest that the chiefs who did not sign simply did not approve of the treaty, although there is no direct evidence of this.¹⁴

In an account written on the same date as the treaty, Pike claimed he informed the Dakota that the U.S. government wished to establish military posts on the Upper Mississippi. He echoed the treaty’s wording in saying that he wished them to “grant to the United States” two parcels of land and that “as we are a people who are accustomed to have all our acts wrote down, in order to have them handed to our children—I have drawn up a form of agreement.” He stated that he would have it “read and interpreted” to them. There is no further discussion of what Pike meant by the term grant or how it was translated into Dakota. As will be seen later in relation to the Dakota Treaty of 1851 at Traverse des Sioux, the term cede was translated there with a Dakota word meaning to give up or throw away. Given the provision for the continuing use of the land by the Dakota, it is likely that such a word used for grant would have made no sense. In any case, the continuing use of the land by the Dakota contradicts the idea of the treaty as involving a sale of land. Further, Pike did go on to explain that this military post would be of benefit to the Dakota who remained around it. He stated that the Dakota’s situation would improve “by communication with the whites.” He further shared that at these posts, “factories”—usually understood to mean government-run trading posts—would be established where Indian people could get their goods cheaper than they did from their traders.¹⁵

Another stated purpose of the government-run posts was “to make peace between you and the Chipeway’s” through diplomacy. Pike wrote in his journal that he intended to take some Ojibwe and Dakota chiefs with him to St. Louis, where peace could be cemented “under the auspices of your mutual father,” meaning General James Wilkinson, then governor of the Louisiana Territory. Pike asked that the Sioux chiefs respect “the flag and protection” Pike would extend to Ojibwe chiefs who came down the river in the spring with him. He would also discourage the traders from Canada who, according to Pike, encouraged the Ojibwe to fight against the Dakota.¹⁶

In 1816 the War Department developed a plan to establish forts on the northwestern frontier, on the land described in the 1805 treaty. In an 1817 report on an expedition initiated to pursue the War Department’s plan, Major Stephen Long recommended constructing a fort at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. The payment dictated by the U.S. Senate did not arrive in Dakota hands for fourteen years, when in 1819 Major Thomas Forsyth, Indian agent in St. Louis, traveled up the Mississippi River on instructions from the War Department, bringing a quantity of goods worth two thousand dollars, to be delivered “in payment of lands ceded by the Sioux Indians to the late Gen. Pike for the United States.” On July 25, 1819, Major Forsyth distributed some of the goods to several Sac and Fox Indians who came to him complaining that one of their brothers had been killed by a white man the previous year. Commencing August 5 at Prairie du Chien in present-day Wisconsin and ending August 26 at the juncture of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, Forsyth distributed the remainder of the goods to various Dakota tribal representatives as payment under the terms of the 1805 treaty.¹⁷

Forsyth’s payment was designed to allow the carrying out of an order from Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (after whom Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis was named) directing Colonel Henry Leavenworth to transfer the bulk of his regiment from Detroit to the juncture of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, so as to begin construction of a fort there. After wintering on the Mendota side of the Minnesota River, Leavenworth moved his encampment to the north, near the spring at what became known as Camp Coldwater. Later that year construction on Fort St. Anthony, the first name given to Fort Snelling, commenced. Leavenworth himself was not sure about the validity of Pike’s treaty, so he negotiated a new one in 1820 to accomplish the same purposes. However, his own treaty was never ratified. In June 1821 Colonel Josiah Snelling succeeded Leavenworth. Snelling redesigned the fort and construction was begun at its present location that fall.¹⁸

In the years following Fort Snelling’s construction, the Treaty of 1805 continued to be discussed in encounters between government agents and Dakota people, each of whom believed for their own reasons that it had been a legitimate treaty. In March 1829 Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro recorded the comments of C̣etaŋ Wakuwa Mani or Little Crow, the only surviving signer of the 1805 treaty: “My Father: Since I was a small boy I have lived upon these Lands near your Fort. I gave this place to your people more than 20 years ago. My Father: I am disposed to be friendly with every body, with your Nation & our neighbours the Chippy. And Sacs & Foxes. It was allways your wish and mine also.”¹⁹

The statements are in keeping with the Dakota idea that they were giving Pike the right to build forts as a means to further the mediation between Dakota and Ojibwe and other groups. Little Crow also mentions the work of Taliaferro, Pike’s successor, in that continuing mediation.

At a meeting on June 15, 1829, Little Crow may have repeated his statement about the land on which Fort Snelling stood, because Taliaferro recorded remarks from Kaḣboka, or the Drifter, described as the second chief of the Black Dog band: “My Father I will speak a few words to you. What the Chief the Little Crow said to you this day is all true—he gave you the land on which your Fort now Stands. My Brother was on the spot at the time & knew but he is now no more for he lays among the white people—and I am sorry he did not live longer that you might have known him better.” Although Little Crow spoke that day, the remarks recorded by Taliaferro do not echo what he had said earlier. However, Taliaferro did record a speech on July 31, 1829, in which the chief stated, “My Father—I gave you the Land on which your fort Stands, if I had not been friendly disposed and wished the white people to settle near me—you would not have gotten an inch of ground from me.”²⁰

In this period Dakota bands around Fort Snelling were concerned about both the boundaries of the land on which a military post could be built and operated and what rights the military had to the resources within and surrounding those boundaries. In September 1829 Wambdi Taŋka (Big Eagle) of Black Dog village complained to Taliaferro that trees his people needed for fencing and houses were being cut near his village. The following September Wambdi Taŋka returned to see Taliaferro and the fort’s commanding officer. Taliaferro wrote, “He wished to know the exact bounds to the U S. reserve—around Fort Snelling—& what we claim as his people wished to be immediately informed.”²¹

Taliaferro responded that the military reservation extended from two miles below the fort up to St. Anthony Falls and beyond for nine miles on each side of the Mississippi. This territory would extend just beyond Penichon’s village. Taliaferro stated that Henry Leavenworth had misled the Dakota about these boundaries when he negotiated the never-ratified Treaty of 1820, noting that Leavenworth “included by 4½ miles less than Pike—which oversight—has induced the Indians contiguous to this Post to aver that they only gave Pike a mile around the present site of Fort Snelling—or as they say just as far as can be seen around the Fort without elevating the eyes—which would be at the rate of two miles in some places one mile in others—where no promontory intervened it would be the greater distance 2 miles.”²²

In response, Wambdi Taŋka told Taliaferro, “It is a matter of surprize to us that your Nation should come here among us poor Indians—to live hard & suffer upon this barren land. You quit a good country when you have a plenty to eat drink & to wear always with good clothes. This seems Strange to us. When the British used to see us we were better off. Our game was plenty, & our hunts good—they came but few among us—& assisted us much. I do not say this that you are to understand me as dislikeing your Nation—for we do not—but since your Nation has been here, they are catching at every thing, & times are altogether changed.“²³

Taliaferro stated that he knew the chief’s feelings. The fort had not been located where it was “to injure any body much less—those whom we feel a disposition to protect.” Its purpose was protecting the fur trade and the traders “& to have proper persons in the Country to carry it on also to have a general depot to Store goods—to be divided, & sent out to different Stations for your accommodation & convenience.” The Dakota had had “many advantages both yourself & people from our location here. Much bread meat & I am assured in saying much bounty at my hands—all of which you cannot deny—but again I can assure you that we derive neither pleasure or satisfaction from our residence in your Nation, on the contrary such a long Stay has become truly irksome & disagreeable and we wish to be away from you—much worse than you do or can possibly suppose.”²⁴

The first real survey of the Fort Snelling reservation that came into being as a result of the 1805 treaty was not done until 1839, by Lieutenant James Thompson. As shown here in a later version of the map redrawn in the 1850s, the reservation was understood to have included much of the present-day city of Minneapolis as far west as Lakes Calhoun, Harriet, and Cedar as well as portions of Bloomington and Richfield.

Shown here is a portion of a map drawn by Charles C. Royce for an 1899 Bureau of American Ethnology report recording the boundaries for land cessions covered in all of the treaties negotiated by tribes in Minnesota. The boundary at the top shows the 1825 treaty line between the Dakota and Ojibwe.

Questions about the meaning of the Fort Snelling reservation persisted. In June 1835, in a conversation with the American Fur Company trader at Mendota, Henry H. Sibley, Taliaferro referred to Pike’s treaty as not a purchase of land but a “perpetual lease.” He wrote, “M Sibley—asked how I viewed the reserve at this Post Answer—Here is the Law of June 30 1834—my opinion this rese[r]vation at S Peters is nothing more than a perpetual lease under the convention with Pike. The Treaty of 1825 (August) at Prarie du chiens confirms it. It is taken and deemed to be the Indian country in my view of the case—by the act of the 30 June 1834—as before stated.”²⁵

This statement implies that the Treaty of 1805 was affirmed by the Treaty of 1825, a reference to Article 10 of the latter treaty which acknowledged “the general controlling power of the United States” and the existence of several reservations made under previous treaties, including one at St. Peters. Nonetheless, the questions relating to the Treaty of 1805 persisted to such an extent that the Dakota would not sign another treaty in 1837 unless a promise was made to pay some of what they considered they were owed for the earlier treaty. A total of four thousand dollars was distributed to five bands of Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ Dakota in October 1838.²⁶

In 1837 the subject of the treaty’s meaning came up in discussions about the nature of the rights the military and civilians had in the Fort Snelling reservation. Fort commander Lieutenant Colonel William Davenport wrote the U.S. adjutant general about attempts to purchase the flour mills built by the military at St. Anthony Falls. Davenport insisted it was not in the public interest to sell the mills. Cattle imported for army use were kept at the mill before slaughter, where there were accommodations for the men who herded them and all the necessary enclosures for the cattle and hay. He interpreted Pike’s treaty as simply the Dakota’s consent to establish the fort, not a sale of land, so that the Indians never parted with the right in the soil or any other right they previously enjoyed: “Thus we are on Indian land and cannot grant any part of it to a person for private use.” Taliaferro’s point was that the land was Indian country by definition of federal law, an area where land purchases by private individuals were prohibited.²⁷

Even after the Dakota were paid money for Pike’s Treaty in 1838 and the new treaty was signed, government correspondence refers to continuing rights under Article 3 of Pike’s treaty, “to pass, repass, hunt or make other uses of the said districts, as they have formerly done.” On April 23, 1839, Fort Snelling post surgeon John Emerson wrote to Surgeon General Thomas Lawson to complain about the presence of trader Joseph R. Brown selling whiskey within gunshot of the fort. As a solution he suggested extending the military reserve to an area twenty miles square, including the mouth of the St. Croix, “especially as the Indians are allowed by treaty to hunt on it.”²⁸

Conflicts between the Dakota and other nearby tribes are a subtext within the larger Dakota treaty narrative. The Dakota relationship to the land included sharing that land from time to time with others, in contrast to the European American perspective that the land was a possession and property rights allowed the exclusion of others from the land. The Dakota and other nations moved back and forth through the area of Mni Sota Makoce, which the Dakota considered their sacred homeland, and the idea of drawing a boundary across it would have made little sense to them.

In August 1825, U.S. government officials met at Prairie du Chien to negotiate a “firm and perpetual peace” between the Dakota and the Ojibwe, the Sac and Fox, the Menominee, the Ioway, the Ho-Chunk, and the Odawa. The treaty attempted to establish boundaries between the lands the various nations occupied in the region of the Upper Mississippi River. For the Dakota, this involved a negotiated boundary between them and the Sac and Fox and Ioway to the south and the Ojibwe to the north. Tribes would not hunt on each other’s lands without their assent and that of the U.S. government. The various nations acknowledged the general controlling power of the United States and disclaimed all dependence upon and connection with any other power.

In 1823 Lawrence Taliaferro, as Indian agent at St. Peters, proposed that the Dakota and Ojibwe should both send delegates to Washington to negotiate a settlement and draw up a boundary. The following year Taliaferro took a party of Dakota, Ojibwe, and Menominee on the first of a series of trips to Washington, one purpose of which was to give them a chance to see something of the white man’s strength and numbers. Although no treaty was signed, the groundwork was laid for a great intertribal council at Prairie du Chien the next year.²⁹

Agent Taliaferro gathered a delegation of 385 Dakota and Ojibwe of the Mississippi at Fort Snelling, including interpreters and assistants. They made their way downriver and at length halted at the Painted Rock above Prairie du Chien. After “attending to their toilet and appointment of soldiers to dress the columns of boats, the grand entry was made with drums beating, many flags flying, with incessant discharges of small arms. All Prairie du Chien was drawn out, with other delegations already arrived, to witness the display and landing of this ferocious looking body of true savages.”³⁰

Twenty-six Dakota leaders, representing the Waḣpekute, Waḣpetuŋwaŋ, Sisituŋwaŋ, and Ihaŋktuŋwaŋ, were present at the treaty negotiation. At the beginning of the treaty council Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis William Clark told the assembled delegates that the lack of clear boundaries between nations was the cause of hostilities: “Your hostilities have resulted in a great measure from your having no defined boundaries established in your country. Your tribes do not know what belongs to them & your peoples thus follow the game into lands claimed by other tribes. This cause will be removed by the establishment of boundaries which shall be known to you & which boundaries we must establish at the council fire.”³¹

In fact the purpose of establishing boundaries may have been as much for facilitating treaties of cession for the lands as for establishing peace. Though the federal policy of relocating Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River was not formally passed by Congress until 1830, the Prairie du Chien treaty prepared the way for removal by establishing boundaries that would be cited in treaties ceding land in the years ahead. In light of ongoing disagreements between tribes, forcing a few tribal leaders to agree to boundaries that might or might not be respected by all tribal members certainly did not guarantee peace.

1825

A treaty between various tribes of the Upper Mississippi valley is signed at Prairie du Chien, laying out boundaries between tribes.

Tribal leaders knew that portions of their territory was shared, and some tried to warn the American officials that they had differing concepts of land ownership. Coramonee, a Ho-Chunk chief, said, “The lands I claim are mine and the nations here know it is not only claimed by us but by our Brothers the Sacs and Foxes, Menominees, Iowas, Mahas, and Sioux. They have held it in common. It would be difficult to divide it. It belongs as much to one as the other…My Fathers I did not know that any of my relations had any particular lands. It is true everyone owns his own lodge and the ground he may cultivate. I had thought the Rivers were the common property of all Red Skins and not used exclusively by any particular nation.”³²

Similarly Noodin (the Wind), an Ojibwe leader from the St. Croix–Mille Lacs region, saw a danger in forcing the tribes to agree to a boundary: “I wish to live in peace—But in running marks round our country or in giving it to our enemies it may make new disturbances and breed new wars.” A Menominee chief named Grizzly Bear said, “We travel about a great deal and go where there is game among the Nations around who do not restrain us from doing so.” Tribal groups often made accommodations with each other and did not require a fixed boundary.³³

The major disagreements at the council occurred in defining the boundaries between the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Sac and Fox. Leaders from these groups gave detailed descriptions, sometimes with the help of maps, laying out their territories. Only those Dakota leaders whose lands bordered neighboring nations demarcated their territories’ relevant boundaries, often not only naming rivers, lakes, and landmarks but noting they were born in or had long connection to these areas. The territories generally corresponded to areas where the Dakota were often described as hunting in the nineteenth century and earlier.

Wabasha, leader of the southernmost Dakota band along the Mississippi, stated that despite his claims he was willing to “relinquish some of my lands for the sake of peace.” He noted he had formerly owned the lands at Prairie du Chien but had given them up to the whites. He described a southern boundary for his land extending west of the Mississippi River from below the mouth of the Upper Iowa River to the head of the Raccoon fork of the Upper Cedar River. Beyond that, he said, “I leave for my relations to settle.”³⁴

C̣etaŋ Wakuwa Mani or Little Crow, the surviving 1805 treaty signer, defined boundaries that bordered Ojibwe country in the north, extending from the falls of the Chippewa River to the first river above the falls of the St. Croix and up the St. Croix to Cedar Island, a day’s march above the falls at present-day Taylors Falls, Minnesota–St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. Ṣakp̣e’s boundary lay west of that described by Little Crow. He stated that he was born on the Minnesota River and that his line “commences at Crow Island and Sandy hills on the East of the Mississippi and runs along where the timber joins the meadow to the Mississippi at the Isle [Aile] de Corbeau [Crow Wing] at the mouth of the Crow Wing River.”³⁵

A Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leader known as the Little then spoke: “The Band of the lakes have been speaking. I am of the prairie. I claim the land up the River Corbeau [Crow River] to its source & from there to Otter Tail Lake. I can yet show the marks of my lodges there and they will remain as long as the world lasts.” Tataŋka Nażiŋ or Standing Buffalo, a Sisituŋwaŋ leader from Lake Traverse and Lac qui Parle, stated that his lands commenced at Ottertail Lake and ran north to Pine Lake and the Pine River, which emptied into the Red River. Wanataŋ, the Ihaŋktuŋwaŋ leader, said, “I am from the plains and it is of that part of our Country of which I speak. My line commences where Thick Wood River empties into Red River thence down Red River to Turtle River—up Turtle River to its source, thence south of the Devils Lake to the Missouri at the Gros Ventre Village.”³⁶

C̣aŋ Sagye or Cane, a Waḣpekute chief whose territory overlapped with Wabasha’s on the west, stated, “I will now point out the boundary of the land where I was born. It commences at the raccoon fork of the Des Moines River at the mouth of the Raccoon River, thence up to a small lake, the source of Bear River & thence following Bear River to its entrance into the Missouri a little below Council Bluffs (suppose the Bowyer’s [Boyer] river).”³⁷

The artist James Otto Lewis recorded the gathering of tribes at Prairie du Chien in 1825, where leaders came to sign a treaty with the U.S. government containing agreements about tribal boundaries.

Among the Ojibwe leaders, two from the Minnesota region delineated land overlapping that of the Dakota, though notably they did not claim birthright for this territory. Pee a jick [Bayezhig], or Single Man, an Ojibwe leader from Mille Lacs who also had Dakota ancestry, gave a southern boundary beginning at the mouth of the Chippewa River and extending to the head of Lake St. Croix, “thence to Green water Lake, thence to the mouth of Rum River,” across the Mississippi to the headwaters of the Crow and Sauk rivers. He said, “This is the land I claim for myself & my children hereafter.” He presented a birch-bark map showing the area. Kau ta wa be taa (Broken Tooth) of Sandy Lake claimed a line going beyond Pee a jick’s through the Crow River, to the Red River and beyond to Devils Lake.³⁸

After some discussion, agreement was reached for a boundary between the Dakota and Ojibwe that, as historian Gary Clayton Anderson pointed out, appears to split the overlapping territory in the Minnesota region. The treaty’s wording described the boundary in terms of locations known to both nations, though identifying those exact locations today is not always easy. The eastern end of the boundary began

From there the boundary continued in a diagonal line across the present state to the Red River near the mouth of “Outard or Goose creek.”³⁹

Negotiations between the Dakota and the Sac and Fox were more difficult because of disagreements about the names given to the various forks of the Raccoon River, which involved the Waḣpekute and persisted after the treaty. The treaty also provided for further consultation with the Ihaŋktuŋwaŋ (who had not been fully represented at the negotiation) about the boundary in the area between the Des Moines and Missouri rivers.⁴⁰

At the end of the negotiations, after the treaty was read and “explained to the Indians article by article,” William Clark brought out a beaded belt of wampum, such as had been used in negotiations involving Indian people and European governments in North America for hundreds of years, and sought to cast the agreement as a “religious contract between all the tribes,” represented in the belt’s patterns of beadwork. He pointed out the representation of the Great Father and the “twenty-four great fires” on the belt and offered it to the treaty signers, after which they smoked a pipe. The treaty journal does not record any responses to this aspect of the negotiation.

Although the treaty contains no cessions, it was in effect a cessional treaty for all tribes who gave up claims to land. For the Dakota the line drawn would, for all practical purposes, “cede” the northern portion of their ancestral homeland to the Ojibwe, who had come to dominate it only seventy-five years earlier when the Dakota moved out of the Mille Lacs area. As it turned out, the treaty did not have the desired effect of quelling skirmishes across the line between rival Dakota and Ojibwe bands, but it did “ratify” the Dakota’s separation from the northern reaches of their homeland that had come about as a result of the Ojibwe migration to the west. Mni Sota Makoce—the place where the Dakota dwell—had now formally become the place where the Dakota and the Ojibwe dwell.

The treaty was proclaimed by President Martin Van Buren on February 6, 1826: “The negotiations between the Sioux and the Chippewa, with which alone we are concerned, resulted in an agreement on a dividing line between their respective countries, which the Indians solemnly promised would never be crossed by either nation unless on peaceful missions.” But the treaty did not transform relations between Dakota and Ojibwe. The Dakota saw the Ojibwe pushing even beyond the agreed-upon boundaries. In June 1829, the chief of Black Dog village complained to Taliaferro, “My Father. We made peace with the Chippeways and gave them up much of our Lands—but it appears they are not satisfied with this but continue to trespass on our Lands which are bad enough & take every thing clean from the Earth as they go.” Similarly, in June 1832, Taliaferro heard several Dakota chiefs tell him, in council, “Our lands are destitute of game & our old enemies the Chippeways by constant encroachments—keep our lands so closely to themselves—ever since our treaty at Pra[i]rie du Chien that we suffer more than [can] be well conceived.”⁴¹

The Ojibwe-Dakota boundary was not surveyed until 1835, after repeated requests by the Indians. In Taliaferro’s journal for 1835 are twenty-seven entries, beginning June 10 and ending September 23, related to the survey of the “S & C Line” by Major Jonathan L. Bean, whom the Dakota called, according to Taliaferro, “Blue Cloud.” While the survey was in progress both Dakota and Ojibwe complained of the location. Taliaferro wrote to Major Bliss, commander of Fort Snelling, on August 30, 1835, that the Ojibwe would not observe the landmarks or survey markers but on the contrary had been throwing them down and attempting to demolish many of them. He predicted occasional bloodshed for the reason that, since their country was “not at all adequate to the support of their population,” the Ojibwe would force themselves on the Dakota’s hunting grounds. A few years later it was reported by a Methodist missionary that boundary mounds constructed by the surveyors “had been destroyed by the Chippewa Indians; and he was under the impression that the Chippewas were opposed to having mounds made in their country.” The missionary reported that “Indians greatly prefer natural boundary lines where the situation of the country will permit.”⁴²

Bde Wambdi Waḣapi / The Place Where They Buried the Eagles

Bde Wambdi Waḣapi lies somewhere between Green Lake and Forest Lake in present-day Chisago and Washington counties. The exact location of this site and the explanation for the name have not been determined precisely. In the winter of 1828 Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro noted that a group of Ojibwe from the St. Croix River region “left early this Morning for their Camp near the Sioux—at the Two Lakes called by them—The place they bury Eagles in.” It made sense that members of the two sometimes-hostile peoples would meet in this area because they recognized their shared occupation of this place. As a result, the location was along the boundary set by the multi-tribal Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. Article 5 placed the boundary along the St. Croix River on the west, thence passing between two lakes called by the Ojibwe “Green Lakes” and by the Dakota “the lakes they bury the Eagles in,” and from thence to the standing cedar that “the Sioux Split,” a location along the Rum River which may have specific—though unexplained—cultural meaning.ⁱⁱⁱ

On an 1843 map, Joseph Nicollet located Buried Eagle Lake close to the St. Croix River, in the watershed of the present-day Sunrise River north of a lake he calls Green Lake. There is a Green Lake at Chisago City, and it is possible that Buried Eagle Lake is present-day Forest Lake. Archaeological information may shed additional light on the question. Based on information from a late-nineteenth-century survey, Newton Winchell described ten mounds on the northeastern shore of Green Lake, located on a peninsula between that lake and Chisago Lake to the north. Included is an unusual configuration of two mounds connected by a semicircular embankment.^iv

In fact, the government’s insistence that the Dakota and Ojibwe reach an agreement about an exact boundary appears to have aggravated the situation between them. Until then, the two peoples would reach yearly agreements about sharing the territory for winter hunting. Such agreements were still necessary despite the definition of the boundary line.

Even if the Ojibwe-Dakota boundary had been surveyed immediately after the Treaty of 1825, however, it would probably not have brought about the stability on the frontier that Americans desired. The next attempt to resolve the issue came in 1830, when Congress passed the Removal Act, which attempted to end the ongoing conflict between the indigenous peoples and the immigrant-settlers along the frontier by removing the Indian people from their lands and moving them west. The impact of this law would be felt later in the Minnesota region than in other parts of the United States.

1830

The Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress, authorizes the president to negotiate with tribes to give up land in the East in exchange for land in the West. A treaty is signed with Dakota and other tribes to settle unsolved questions about the 1825 treaty.

At Prairie du Chien in July 1830, leaders representing the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ, Sisituŋwaŋ, Waḣpetuŋwaŋ, and Waḣpekute signed a treaty ceding a tract of country twenty miles in width, from the Mississippi to the Des Moines River, situated to the north and adjoining the line agreed upon between them and the Sac and Fox in the Treaty of 1825. This was part of a larger agreement, essentially an extension of the 1825 treaty, whereby the Dakota and the other tribes gave up their lands between the Des Moines and the Missouri for the purpose of establishing a neutral “common hunting ground” to be administered by the president of the United States. As stated in the treaty, “it is understood that the lands ceded and relinquished by this Treaty, are to be assigned and allotted under the direction of the President of the United States, to the Tribes now living thereon, or to such other Tribes as the President may locate thereon for hunting, and other purposes.” Lawrence Taliaferro took credit for this aspect of the treaty, noting “The purchase of Lands on the disputed line between the Sacs—Foxes—& the Sioux was at my instance.” He also urged that a similar agreement be reached between the Dakota and Ojibwe. Waḣpekute leader “Wiash ho ha,” who was known at the time as French Crow, stated, “You have asked for a piece of land, but you must give us $3,000 for it, and the privilege of hunting on it, and no white man must come on it.” In the end they received only two thousand dollars from the treaty, though with other benefits.⁴³

Also at the treaty the Dakota agreed to establish a tract of land for the people of Dakota and European ancestry, beginning at Barn Bluff near Red Wing village, running back fifteen miles from the Mississippi, and then in a parallel line with Lake Pepin and the Mississippi, ending around the Grand Encampment located at one of the Wabasha village sites opposite the mouth of the Buffalo River, to be held by them “in the same manner that other Indian Titles are held.” The people to be benefited were sometimes called “half-breeds,” and the area set aside was called the “Wabasha Reservation” or the “Half-Breed Tract.” The Dakota themselves made no distinctions based on blood quantum, preferring instead to call people of such mixed ancestry with a term usually translated as “our relations”—probably from takuyapi or unkitakuyapi, versions of the word for relatives cited at the beginning of this chapter. The Wabasha Reservation was later abolished and those it was intended to benefit were issued scrip, allowing them to obtain land in other locations.⁴⁴

At the 1830 negotiations Wabasha made clear that as with the neutral ground, he agreed to give up the strip of land for the mixed bloods providing the Dakota would continue to have “the privilege of hunting on it.” Other chiefs deferred to Wabasha. Little Crow—still C̣etaŋ Wakuwa Mani, the 1805 treaty signer—stated, “We say nothing about the land you spoke of. We leave that all to Wabashaw. But we have brought down a few pipes to smoke with those with whom we have made peace & to the custom of our people.” The 1830 treaty was the first treaty after Pike’s whereby the Dakota formally ceded any land to the U.S. government and the first to provide yearly payments of money in the form of annuities. The eastern Dakota received two thousand dollars a year for the period of ten years. They also were to be supplied with a blacksmith to work for them, with iron, steel, and tools from the government, as well as tools for agricultural purposes.⁴⁵

The press for “cession” (which could also be called “sale”) of land by the indigenous people to the United States became a major theme in the 1830s. The first significant formal cession of Dakota land was undertaken with the Treaty of 1837 in Washington. Despite Taliaferro’s high hopes for the 1830 treaty, it did not accomplish what he had expected of it. Relations between the Dakota and the Sac and Fox worsened, as did those with the Ojibwe after the attempt to draw a boundary line in 1835. The answer, it seemed to Taliaferro, lay in another treaty, not merely to try to improve relations between the Dakota and their neighbors but also to cede lands east of the Mississippi for logging, an increasingly important industry in the region.⁴⁶

Taliaferro began to think about such a treaty in late 1835. In a conversation with Major Bliss, commander at Fort Snelling, he suggested that a treaty might involve ceding Dakota lands east of the Mississippi and moving the Ho-Chunk west of the river. He noted that traders, including the American Fur Company, might try to use the agreement to seek repayment of the Dakota’s debts, something Taliaferro had successfully opposed in the Treaty of 1830. The trading companies’ claims were based on paper debts and not necessarily actual debts because for generations traders had calculated their rates of exchange of furs for merchandise to allow for the variability of fur animal populations and their customers’ ability to pay. Some had begun to give out credit to native peoples expecting to be reimbursed by the federal government. Taliaferro believed the traders would oppose the treaty until they could have him removed from his job.⁴⁷

The following spring Taliaferro vowed he would leave his post once he could get such a treaty signed. He continued to write of the “rascality & frauds permitted by the treaty making power generally.” He wrote, “The Am F Cpy [American Fur Company] I say or many of its traders are disposed to stop short of nothing in getting me off from this Agency before the treaties in question are to be commenced with my Indians. But I feel doubly strong in my integrity.” In July Taliaferro warned that traders threatened or corrupted Indian people into receiving goods, forcing an “acquiescence to their diabolical plans of procuring gold out of their [natives’] hunts and mainly from the proceeds of the sales of their lands to the United States.”⁴⁸

Taliaferro submitted a detailed proposal for a treaty to Superintendent William Clark in 1836, receiving a cool reception from Clark and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Elbert Herring. Later in the year, after jurisdiction of the St. Peter Agency was transferred to Governor Henry Dodge of Wisconsin Territory, the treaty was looked upon more favorably. On November 30, 1836, Taliaferro sent a new proposal to Indian Commissioner Carey A. Harris, who appeared to share the enthusiasm. Later, in July 1837, in full view of the Dakota bands, a treaty with the Ojibwe was signed at Fort Snelling, ceding Ojibwe lands east of the Mississippi River and south of the Lake Superior watershed.⁴⁹

The chief negotiator for the Ojibwe treaty was Henry Dodge, who after its completion gave Taliaferro written instruction to organize two delegations of Dakota to go to Washington, one from those who lived along the boundary with the Sac and Fox, “for peace purposes,” and the other of Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ Dakota “who claim the Lands East of the Mississippi.” It was apparent the latter group would be asked to sign a treaty cession for their land, though this plan was apparently not discussed openly and it may be that the Dakota themselves were not aware of it prior to their departure. In early August, Hercules Dousman, agent of the American Fur Company at Prairie du Chien, wrote that the delegations would be going “ostensibly to make peace, but the real object is to get their Lands.” Dousman had been shown a copy of Taliaferro’s letter and had actively lobbied against the treaty. His efforts were evidence of Taliaferro’s fear that the greatest obstacles to completing the treaty would come not from the Dakota but from the American Fur Company. For this reason, officials had decided to hold the treaty negotiations in Washington, despite the logic of having them at Fort Snelling.⁵⁰

Among those with a special interest in the treaty was the Mendota trader Henry H. Sibley, who was present in Washington. Sibley had particular motivation for attempting to influence the treaty negotiations. He had come to the territory in 1834, just in time to cash in at the very end of the successful fur trade and also to experience the difficulties of its decline. He soon became skilled in manipulating the engines of government for his own purposes. Sibley clearly knew of the planned treaty, if only because Taliaferro needed supplies for the delegation going to Washington. On August 16 Taliaferro purchased coats, “laced & garnished,” for ten chiefs, and a variety of other cloth, clothing, blankets, and looking glasses. Taliaferro apparently tried to mislead observers into thinking he would be leaving later than he did. Sibley wrote in mid-August to American Fur Company representatives that the delegation would not depart for Washington until September 1, at which point he would follow. Other sources suggest the delegation left around August 18. Historian Edward Neill later wrote that Taliaferro was “keeping his own council.” He engaged a steamboat captain to be at the landing at a certain date, and then “to the astonishment of the traders, the Agent, interpreters, and a part of the delegation were quickly on board, and gliding down the river.” Stops were made at Kap’oża, Red Wing, and Winona to pick up other delegation members.⁵¹

Included were at least twenty-six Dakota leaders, numbering among them not only Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ and Waḣpekute but also Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ, who were not among the twenty-one who ultimately signed the treaty. The explanation for their presence comes from the instructions Taliaferro had received from Governor Dodge to bring delegations both for selling lands east of the Mississippi River and of “the Sioux on the Sac & Fox territory for peace purposes.” The various Dakota communities along the Upper Minnesota River all hunted, on occasion, along the line with the Sac and Fox. Though they did not all sign the treaty, some of them participated in its negotiation.⁵²

On August 21, Taliaferro and his delegation reached Prairie du Chien. He wrote to Dodge at Mineral Point, stating that he intended to proceed with the delegation by way of the Ohio to Wheeling and thence to Bedford, Pennsylvania, where his wife’s family had a hotel, stating that he could “subsist my Delegation for a few days for one half less than in Washington.” He planned to wait there until Dodge arrived “with the other tribes,” probably meaning the Sac and Fox.⁵³

Taliaferro and the delegation reached Washington on September 15, where they were boarded at the Globe Hotel. On September 20, Taliaferro outlined for fellow officials a proposed treaty that would cede all Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ Dakota lands east of the Mississippi River between the mouth of the Upper Iowa River and Watab, on the Mississippi River near the present-day town of that name. He advised that one million dollars be paid for the cession. Despite his concerns about fraud on the part of traders, Taliaferro appeared to be open to putting some such provision in the treaty, though he stated that “great care is necessary or extensive frauds will be practiced not only on the Indians but on the government.” He suggested that all claims for amounts due from the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ to traders “be laid before the Agent and Sec. of the [treaty] Commission to prevent frauds.”⁵⁴

On September 21 negotiations began at a Presbyterian church, where those not working for the government were excluded. The record of the treaty meetings provides little evidence of real negotiations. Rather it suggests that government officials had a firm idea of what they wanted based on Taliaferro’s suggestions but were unwilling to reveal the terms until well along in the process. Whether designed to keep the Dakota in the dark or to forestall the traders’ influence is not clear.⁵⁵

Each day’s council was preceded by smoking a pipe passed from the treaty commissioner, Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, who was aided in his negotiations by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Carey Harris, to the chiefs. The commissioner began the first session by making clear the negotiations were primarily about the cession of land. He noted that the Dakota had come through “some of our great towns” and had seen “the power of the Nation.” This power would never be used to exert evil against them but only to protect them. The purpose of selling their land was to “place the great river between you and the Whites.” The hunting grounds west of the river should be sufficient for them. In return for selling their land they would be given money and things they needed. But rather than proposing terms, the commissioner indicated he was ready to receive “any proposition you may be prepared to make for that purpose.” It seems the government officials were holding their cards close to the vest, insisting that the Dakota name a price before the officials described the lands they wanted.⁵⁶

The first Dakota leader to speak was Wakiŋyaŋ Taŋka, Big Thunder, son of the recently deceased Little Crow, who would later come to be known by his father’s name. He stated, “My Father, we live a great distance in the West, from the rising of the Sun. We have occupied the lands we now live on. We did not come here to learn the strength of your nation. Our friends have been here and have told us of your power.” He said they had nothing to say but would be willing to speak the following day.⁵⁷

Subsequent meetings suggest government officials were reluctant to make a full proposal until they had heard what the Dakota wanted. On September 22, Ehake, a leader whose village connection was not named, spoke, stating they had no idea yet of the extent of the lands which government officials wanted. At this point the commissioner stated, “Your father will buy all of your lands East of the Mississippi for what he will pay you, one million dollars as may hereafter be agreed upon.” The Dakota responded that they wished to think over the proposition until the next day.⁵⁸

At the meeting on Saturday, September 23, the commissioner began by asking the Dakota if they had an answer to the government’s offer. In response Ehake stated that they hoped he would consider that they were “naked, you are rich and well clothed.” The amount offered when divided among the Dakota would give “but little to each.” The commissioner responded that if he had not considered their needs the amount offered would not be “more than one half of the amount.” He stated, “The offer will not be changed.”⁵⁹

In response Ehake noted that the recent purchase of Ojibwe lands involved “low and marshy country,” while Dakota lands were worth much more. Other leaders representing the various bands spoke, emphasizing in different ways how little the amount offered would give to each Dakota person. It was only after a Sunday break in the meetings that on September 25 the commissioner presented the details of how the one million dollars would be divided in the terms of the treaty. The largest single portion of the money would be invested to pay them a permanent annuity. Other money would be used to pay their trade debts, settle the claims of “the Half Breeds”—or those of Dakota-European ancestry—and pay for agriculture, for blacksmiths, and for presents.⁶⁰

After receiving these terms, the assembled Dakota took the paper describing the division with them and spent until late afternoon discussing it among themselves. They reported they wished to keep considering the matter until they had counseled more. It appears the discussion continued until Wednesday, September 27, when the Dakota indicated they were still not in agreement about the terms. They had hoped for a higher payment but had been told that the “great council now in session” (Congress) would not accept that. The Dakota felt they were in the same situation: they were afraid “our people will not consent.” That afternoon, the Dakota leaders returned with their own proposal, apparently changing somewhat the proportions but accepting the total amount of the government’s offer. A number of chiefs spoke about their decision, after which the commissioner responded that he felt they had left out “many useful articles that they cannot well do without,” such as tobacco, salt, provisions, and stock. He said he would return with his own proposal for dividing the money.⁶¹

On September 28 several Dakota leaders, speaking in turn, asked for a further change in the provisions to the treaty, concerning the amount set aside for “our relations,” that is, the people of Dakota-European ancestry. The leaders asked that the amount be increased to $110,000. Aside from that they accepted the terms offered. Wasu Wic̣aṡtaṡni, known as Bad Hail, stated, “I addressed you the other day. I told you that I was a chief and a soldier. My father we are a part of the nation called the Seven Fires. We hope you will consent to our proposition.”⁶²

The following day, September 29, a number of Dakota chiefs spoke about the treaty and those that preceded it. Among them was Mazamani, the Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leader from the Little Rapids village, who stated, “Since I came here I find that I have no claims to these lands. I thought I had but my friends here say that I have not. I am an old man. I shall not prevent you from buying these lands. [T]hey feel sore about parting with this country. It would bring a great price if you could cut it up and bring it here.” Ehake spoke about the land set aside for “some of our relations” in the Treaty of 1830. He pointed out that this land had not been surveyed. He asked if “you will allow us to hunt on the land we now give up to you” and said that they wished “to reserve the islands in the river so that we can go and cut wood.” He also asked that when they were paid money it should be in silver pieces. Other chiefs spoke about these and other requests. Maḣpiya Nażiŋhaŋ (Mauc peeah nasiah, Standing Cloud) noted, “We never dreamt of selling you our lands until your agent our Father invited us to come and visit our Great Father. The land that we give up to you is the best that we have. We hope you will allow us to hunt on it.”⁶³

After the Dakota chiefs finished speaking, the commissioner presented them with the treaty for signing. Some of what they had just requested, including the right to hunt and the ownership of the islands, was not in the treaty. In fact, the treaty specifically included the islands in the land ceded. Article 1 stated that “the chiefs and braves representing the parties having an interest therein cede to the United States all their lands East of the Mississippi River and all their islands in the Said river.” From this example it is easy to conclude that the version presented for signing may not have been read or interpreted fully for the Dakota leaders.⁶⁴

Henry Sibley himself did not know the exact nature of the provisions in the treaty until after the signing. Writing to American Fur Company official Ramsay Crooks, he stated, “the whole treaty is but one series of iniquity & wrong and the half breeds here are so exasperated they will not move a step with the Indians, but will go by themselves. This is the boasted paternal regard for the poor Indians, ‘O shame, where is thy blush!’” He noted that part of Article 3, which provided a parcel of land for Taliaferro’s interpreter Scott Campbell, had been kept secret. “Not one of our number knew of this provision till the Indians were called upon to sign it after it was read to them.” In the end, the grant to Campbell was stricken from the treaty by Congress.⁶⁵

1837

Three major treaties signed by the Ojibwe (July 29), Ho-Chunk or Winnebago (November 1), and Dakota (September 29) cede all of their land east of the Mississippi River.

In fact, Sibley’s own behavior exemplified the difficulties of getting a fair treaty for the Dakota. Sibley supported the American effort to secure the Dakota land through a cession in the hope that he might then have the Dakota accounts on his trader company books satisfied. On the other hand, Sibley claimed he was concerned about providing for the material well-being of the Dakota, many of whom trusted him and some of whom were related to him through their extended kinship system, based on his relationship with a Dakota woman. By expressing his concern and by actually taking some actions that addressed benefits to the Dakota, Sibley was able to maintain his influence with them and encourage their acquiescence to the cession in the treaty—which of course would secure his own material well-being.

While it is arguably the case that Sibley’s efforts had a beneficial effect on the Dakota in terms of their ability to maintain and provide for a decent way of life, the documentary evidence makes clear that his central concern throughout was to maintain his own financial security and also to secure his position in the growing immigrant-settler community. In a letter written to Ramsay Crooks after the treaty was signed, Sibley demonstrated that neither he nor the other traders would be satisfied with what they got out of the treaty for the land east of the Mississippi. He wrote, “The Sioux Indians leave today for home, having come to the conclusion not to treat for the land West of the Miss[issippi], which I am not sorry for, as we can make much better treaties at home than we can here.” He was already thinking of the next treaty.⁶⁶

After the treaty signing, Dakota leaders met with Sac and Fox to negotiate for peace and then returned to the Upper Mississippi. Nearly nine months elapsed between the Dakota treaty signing and its formal proclamation, with an additional delay before the promised annuities would begin arriving at the agency. This period was filled with anxiety, fueled in part because even before the treaty was proclaimed white lumbermen, loggers, and settlers had begun to come into the region. Two years after the treaties were signed, the first sawmill on the St. Croix was put in operation at Marine. Five years later, in 1844, lumber manufacture was begun at Stillwater.⁶⁷

In May 1838 Taliaferro noted that several Dakota chiefs came to the agency to report their dissatisfaction, based on “reports all winter unpleasant to the Indians—& calculated to render them suspicious of the government and dissatisfied with their tr[e]aty—& if practicable with their Agent and Interpreters.” They had been worried “that the treaty would not be fulfilled—that their people thought they would be deceived—with many other idle Stories.” He noted, “It is a hard matter for the Agent to disabuse their Ears as to much ridiculous stuff Infused into their minds.” Taliaferro tried to quell the rumors they heard, though his task was considerably difficult in the case of the islands, as they had been included in the land cession contrary to Dakota wishes. A few days later Taliaferro wrote that he told visiting chiefs “to say nothing about Islands which had been sold nor the land—but leave the whites alone and not seek to disturb Set[t]lers nor to make war on the Chippewas on the Lands which they had sold to the United States.”⁶⁸

Some of the annuity goods and money began to be paid in the fall of 1838. However, in the years ahead, the first provision in Article 2 proved to be a more lasting problem. Under the treaty, the U.S. government would “invest the sum of $300,000 (three hundred thousand dollars) in such safe and profitable State stocks as the President may direct, and to pay to the chiefs and braves as aforesaid, annually, forever, an income of not less than five per cent. thereon; a portion of said interest, not exceeding one third, to be applied in such manner as the President may direct, and the residue to be paid in specie, or in such other manner, and for such objects, as the proper authorities of the tribe may designate.” Strictly interpreted this clause would have provided the Dakota, apart from any other treaty arrangements, with an annual payment of ten thousand dollars in perpetuity to be divided up by the tribal leadership. Another five thousand dollars would be applied for whatever the president decided. Government officials appear to have assumed the government would spend this money for educational programs, including the missionary schools. Paying this money directly to the Dakota was opposed by missionaries, who felt it would “render them indolent and dissipated,” though their point of view was hardly disinterested.⁶⁹

There had been no real discussion of schools in the treaty negotiations. On the second day, Commissioner Harris had noted that with the money received from selling the lands the Dakota could “buy a great many comforts” and could use it to “build churches, to establish schools, to procure blacksmiths.” When the first part of Article 2 was initially presented to the Dakota, Harris stated that the interest on the principal, which was then $200,000, “would be sufficient to maintain schools support Blacksmiths and all the necessary articles if given them at once it would be soon lost.” At the same time, this first draft of the treaty contained $170,000 for “agricultural purposes, smiths, etc.” Throughout the process the Dakota had never mentioned schools. The closest they came to the subject was when Kaḣboka (Koc Mo Ko, the Drifter), the chief from the Black Dog village and later Cloud Man’s village, asked for help in teaching them how to plant corn and “cultivate our fields.”⁷⁰

Even the ratified treaty did not refer to schools, but it contained in the fifth provision of Article 2 a promise “to expend annually for twenty years, for the benefit of Sioux Indians, parties to this treaty, the sum of $8,250 (eight thousand two hundred and fifty dollars) in the purchase of medicines, agricultural implements and stock, and for the support of a physician, farmers, and blacksmiths, and for other beneficial objects.”

The official government journal kept during the 1837 treaty negotiation makes clear the divergence between the recorded statements and conversations of government officials and Indian people and the resulting wording in the treaty. Despite the Dakota’s specific requests, language appeared in the treaty that did not follow their wishes. As a result, misunderstandings increased in the years that followed. In particular, Dakota people were not content to have the decision about the school fund left entirely in the hands of government officials. For several years the money was not spent at all, accumulating to the amount of fifty thousand dollars in 1850. This fact would be a bone of contention leading up to the treaty negotiations in 1851.⁷¹

The misunderstandings that arose both during the negotiations for the Treaty of 1837 and later during its implementation illustrate a number of misconceptions over the terms of the treaty itself that reflect a deeper cultural divergence in the relationship the two peoples at the treaty table had with the land. The Americans assumed the Dakota would be operating out of the American narrative, with its distinctive view of land as subject to possession and therefore sale. The Dakota at this time, however, are unlikely to have embraced this view—or even to have fully comprehended it. They would have had to change the entire self-understanding of their identity and the land in which they lived. The historical record does not support such a conclusion.

By 1840 the population of the western division of Wisconsin Territory, including land between the Mississippi and the St. Croix rivers, was 351 whites. According to historian William W. Folwell, the population of the rest of the region stretching to the Missouri that would become Minnesota Territory, including whites and “half-breeds: living apart from Native people,” was likely less than double that number, even counting the garrison at Fort Snelling, the missionaries, and the people at trading posts. In contrast there were as many as thirty thousand native people of various tribes in the same region, most of them consisting of various groups of the Dakota Oc̣eti Ṡaḳowiŋ.⁷²

In 1841 James Duane Doty, governor of Wisconsin Territory, negotiated a treaty with the Dakota to create an Indian territory in the region west of the Mississippi. The 1841 treaty was negotiated by Doty at the instigation of Secretary of War John Bell, a longtime supporter of schemes for the “civilization” of Indian tribes. It provided for the cession of land but at the same time created within the ceded area an Indian territory consisting of much of present-day Minnesota—a northern counterpart of the Oklahoma Indian Territory established in 1834. Indian people and a few government employees and traders would be the only inhabitants. Under the treaty, this territory would be governed by provisions similar to those included in the trade and intercourse laws governing the area defined under federal law as Indian country.⁷³

1841

The Dakota sign two treaties with the U.S. government ceding their lands west of the Mississippi River, but the treaties are never ratified.

The treaty provided that the ceded area would be allotted for the settlement of Indian tribes for agricultural purposes, “within which no white man shall be allowed to settle or remain except by the permission of the President.” The area would be governed by “such government, rules and regulations as shall be established by the government of the United States therein; and a governor or superintendent shall be appointed therefor.” Trade in the territory would be strictly controlled, with a representative appointed by the territory’s superintendent or governor to trade with each band in the region. These traders would be required to “comply with all the laws for regulation of trade and intercourse with the Indian and for the government of said territory.”⁷⁴

Supporters of this agreement saw it as a way of getting around problems with many treaties which, among other things, allowed for “unlimited intercourse with the frontier settlers which…brought liquor among the Indians.” The treaty would remove the Indians “far into the interior, and beyond the limits of the future State of Iowa, where it would be impossible for the whites to introduce whiskey among them.” Doty’s treaty aroused a great deal of opposition and was finally rejected by the Senate in August 1842. One of the many criticisms leveled—in particular by powerful Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton—was that the treaty gave the president and executive branch congressional prerogatives to specify the form of government within the proposed Indian territory. As a result, the Senate did not ratify the treaty.⁷⁵

As loggers and settlers came into the region between the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers during the 1840s, older economic activities such as the fur trade became less important. Traders increasingly sought to position themselves to benefit from the new situation. Men like Henry Sibley were eager for a treaty that would include payments such as those Taliaferro had warned about in 1837, for so-called debts on the part of the Dakota. The traders were prepared to use all their influence to bring about a Dakota treaty that would benefit them.

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, those living in the residue of Wisconsin Territory west of the St. Croix River sought to organize a new territory under the name Minnesota. At a convention in Stillwater in the summer of 1848, Sibley was elected to represent the region as a delegate to Congress. In December 1848 Sibley went to Washington, where in January he was allowed to take a seat representing Wisconsin Territory. In the next few months a bill to create Minnesota Territory made it through the House and Senate, passing both in March. Soon after, Alexander Ramsey, a thirty-four-year-old Whig politician from Pennsylvania, was appointed territorial governor.⁷⁶

1849

Minnesota Territory is organized, with Alexander Ramsey as the first territorial governor.

Ramsey soon became a chief player in bringing about the cession of the remaining Dakota lands in Minnesota. Almost as soon as he arrived to take office as governor, Ramsey, with the support of many whites in the territory, began urging his superiors to capitalize on what he represented as the Indians’ eagerness to sell their lands. Ramsey brought with him an expansionist view of the possibilities for the new territory that permitted him to make common cause with Democrat and trader Henry Sibley. These men, who might be rivals on certain national and local issues, became allies in the effort to acquire the “Suland,” as it was called at that time, creating a powerful movement to separate the Dakota from their land. The first attempt at a treaty occurred in 1849, after Commissioner of Indian Affairs Orlando Brown wrote to Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing recommending the negotiation of cessions with the Dakota, “in order to make room for the emigrants now going in large numbers to the new Territory of Minnesota” Ewing approved his recommendation and appointed as commissioners to conduct the negotiations Alexander Ramsey and John Chambers, former governor of Iowa. In September Ramsey asked Sibley to send out runners to notify Dakota chiefs to come to Mendota for a treaty council.⁷⁷

Most Dakota had left for their fall hunts, so few came. Among those who did was Chief Wabasha, who spoke about the issues remaining from earlier treaties, particularly the Treaty of 1837. He asked that the so-called school fund left to the discretion of the president be paid. He stated that he did not know the islands were included in the sale of the land. Ramsey responded that these points could be discussed at some future time. He said that presents would be given to make up for their “supposed losses in the matter” of the islands. He stated that the islands were included in the sale “and explained to them what was meant by the term ‘Islands,’ as the Indians seemed to think there was a distinction between Islands surrounded by water navigable by Steamboats and those which were not.” After refusing to negotiate a treaty, Wabasha gave Ramsey a sheet of paper “in the handwriting of Hon. H. H. Sibley.” The statement included further discussion of the issues Wabasha raised in the meeting, including an apparent acknowledgment about selling the islands but stating “we did not suppose that advantage would be taken of this, to deprive us of large portions of land because a small stream runs around it, as is now the constriction [sic] of the treaty by the whites.”⁷⁸

While Sibley’s involvement in helping the Dakota draft a statement appears to suggest sympathy with their concerns, he also had reasons to delay the treaty until he could ensure that its terms would be favorable to his own interests. Sibley had already expressed the belief that Chambers would oppose any effort to get payment for traders under the treaty. It would be better to delay until the right negotiators were appointed. Sibley was prepared to use his influence with both the Dakota and officials in Washington. Writing to another trader in November 1850, Sibley indicated “The Indians are all prepared to make a treaty when we tell them to do so, and such an one as I may dictate,” adding that “I think I may safely promise you that no treaty can be made without our claims being first secured.”⁷⁹

On his return to Washington as territorial delegate in December 1849, Sibley lobbied for authorization to negotiate a treaty. He and Ramsey addressed a letter to Commissioner Brown with recommendations about how to achieve a treaty with the Dakota. They suggested the Indians would not sit unless assured that they would be permanently located on some portion of the proposed cession. Ramsey suggested they be allowed to remain on the lands north of the Minnesota, above Little Rapids, and that they be further permitted to hunt anywhere on the cession not occupied by whites until the president might direct otherwise. Further, the Indians objected to a limited annuity on the grounds that its expiration would work a hardship on them. A better method, thought both 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 band should become extinct.” Finally, the Doty treaties had made the Indians aware of the value placed on their lands by the whites. There was no hope of buying the land for less than ten cents per 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, with 5 percent interest on the principal. In September 1850 an Indian appropriation bill was passed that included fifteen thousand dollars for expenses to negotiate a treaty with the Dakota for “the extinguishment of their title to lands in Minnesota territory,” but no authorization for negotiating a treaty was issued that fall. In 1851 Ramsey and Luke Lea, the new commissioner of Indian affairs (who was believed to be favorable to the traders), were instructed by Secretary of the Interior Alexander H. H. Stuart to effect a land cession treaty with the Dakota, permitting payment up to ten cents per acre and, if they thought it proper, allowing the Indians to remain on some part of the cession during the pleasure of the president, provided the locations were as remote as possible from the nearest white settlements.⁸⁰

Ramsey and Lea determined to treat first with the “Upper Sioux,” the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ Dakota, who were not receiving annuities from earlier treaties and would likely be more eager to sign than would the “Lower Sioux,” or Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ. This strategy had already been in place for a year. In September 1850 trader Martin McLeod assured Sibley that the “lower fellows” could only be induced to sign a treaty by first negotiating with upper bands, who were “friendly to us,” and that negotiating with them first would bring the other Dakota to terms.⁸¹

Managing the negotiations in this way was especially important because the traders were attempting to get payments to themselves from the treaty, something Congress had already made illegal. By a resolution of the Senate on March 3, 1843, and reiterated by an Act of Congress on March 3, 1847, all annuities and other moneys and all goods paid under treaties must be divided and paid to heads of families or individuals entitled instead of to chiefs or their assignees, though with the proviso that the “discretion of the president” could make exceptions. As historian William W. Folwell noted, the phrase “transformed the prohibition into a mere piece of advice.”⁸²

Carefully planned, the subsequent treaties exemplified the theme of many such documents. As historian Roy Meyer has noted, they were sold to the Indians as being in their best interests, but “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.”⁸³

On the evening of June 28, 1851, a party including Commissioner Lea, Governor Ramsey, Henry Sibley, and visiting dignitaries set out by steamboat from St. Paul for Traverse des Sioux to negotiate with the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ. Although they would not be signing the treaty negotiated there, Ta Oyate Duta, the third generation of the chiefs known as Little Crow, and members of the Kap’oża band also traveled on the steamboat. The party stopped at Fort Snelling at five o’clock the following morning and arrived at Traverse des Sioux on the morning of June 30. Trader Alexander Faribault and missionary Stephen R. Riggs were present to serve as interpreters. Although missionary Gideon Pond had been picked as one of the interpreters, the steamboat Fort Snelling departed before he reached the landing, something Pond himself found to be suspicious.⁸⁴

Only a few of the Sisituŋwaŋ under the leadership of Iṡtaḣba, or Sleepy Eye, the acknowledged elder statesman of the Traverse des Sioux region known to both Dakota and whites, were present when the party arrived. Within a few days some of the Waḣpetuŋwaŋ from Lac qui Parle appeared, but many Sisituŋwaŋ from farther west did not join them for several weeks.

By the time the Dakota people and their representatives gathered for the great conclave, their ability to defend their understanding of their place in Minnesota, their ancestral relationship with the land, had been severely compromised by the region’s growing white population, which competed with the Dakota for resources, making it difficult for them to provide for their material well-being over the winter. This was exacerbated by the failure of the United States to live up to its promises under the 1837 treaty, a fact that would be discussed in the treaty negotiations. The actions and words of government officials during the negotiations, repeatedly pressuring the Dakota, suggesting their decision was a simple one, added to the difficulties in which the Dakota found themselves.

For a number of days the commission met each morning with the expectation of further arrivals. Rations were issued to those already there. Finally, on July 18, as the “last of the upper bands of Sioux” appeared, negotiations began with the smoking of a pipe. Governor Ramsey addressed the gathered Dakota about “the distressed condition of yourselves, your wives, and your children” and the desire of the Great Father, “having a warm heart for you all,” to do something to “mend your condition.” Despite the fact that they had land, they sometimes starved in the summer and froze in the winter. Little or no game remained on their lands, so that the territory was “of little benefit to you.” The Great Father did not have enough land for his white children to use but had “plenty of money and goods.” His red children had more land than they needed. Thus an exchange could be made for their mutual advantage, Ramsey finished, noting that the Great Father had nothing more “at heart than the prosperity and welfare of the red man equally with the white.”⁸⁵

Commissioner Lea then addressed the question of what exactly the Great Father wished from the Dakota. First he noted that he was appointed “to look to the interests of his red children.” Nothing he would ask of them would not be for their benefit. The land they had was of comparatively little value to them. He would not ask them to sell it if he thought it was not in their interest to do so. It would be to their advantage to sell all the land they owned as far west as Lake Traverse, up the Red River of the North and down to the western border of Iowa, east to the Mississippi. But it was not his purpose to deprive them of a home, a “comfortable and sufficient home for yourselves and families.”⁸⁶

After receiving “full compensation for all the land,” the Dakota would be settled on a portion of it for “the future, permanent, and common home of you all.” This situation would be better for them than to be “scattered over so large a region poor and often suffering from want of the necessaries of life.” If they had a country provided for them high up on the Minnesota River, where they could have farms and improvements, they would be separated from the “bad influence of bad white men.” Not only that but the Great Father would give them a great deal in addition, to make them comfortable in the future. Lea offered the example of “many other tribes of red men,” though he did not name them, who had given up their large country, had received money and other provisions, and were now “happier and more comfortable and every year growing better and richer.” Lea listed the other benefits the Dakota would receive in money and supplies during and after their removal. He concluded by adjourning the negotiations so the chiefs and headmen could talk about what they had heard.⁸⁷

At noon on July 19, the negotiations opened again. The pipe was passed. Commissioner Lea said the Dakota had had time to discuss the proposed land sale. He asked for their response. According to the treaty journal, “Here ensued a long pause. No one appeared ready to speak on the part of the Indians.” Then a Sisituŋwaŋ leader named Wic̣aŋḣpi Ite or Star Face, sometimes called “the Orphan,” spoke, noting that not all of his “young men” or band members were present. The commissioner had stated the day before that he was glad to shake their hands, but he had not shaken everyone’s hands. Wic̣aŋḣpi Ite ended by saying, “That is all I have to say.”⁸⁸

To this Ramsey responded testily, reminding them of the previous delay: “A man’s life in this world is very short and each day should show some works. We have now been here three weeks doing nothing.” On arriving at Traverse des Sioux the treaty commission had expected the Dakota to all be there ready to council. The business was of “vital consequence” to the Dakota, “but there must be an end to delay sometime.” Provisions were getting low. There was no time to spare. The commissioners were slated to meet with the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ and Waḣpekute in Mendota. The question, Ramsey said, was “a simple one, would the Dakota sell all their lands and get in return what would make them comfortable for many years,” or would they starve in the midst of a wide country “destitute almost of game”? If they acquiesced to this exchange, the commissioners would surely agree easily upon “the formalities and details of what you should receive.” Commissioner Lea added a few words elaborating on Ramsey’s points.⁸⁹

Wic̣aŋḣpi Ite responded that his young men, who had been en route, had met “some persons” apparently sent by the commissioners to tell them to turn back. Ramsey responded in words suggesting that he knew this. He said it was not necessary for all the chief’s people or young men to be present for a treaty signing: the government only required chiefs and head men. He added, “by sending notice in time for them to turn back they are at least prevented from suffering” if the food supplies at the negotiation were to run out. After the negotiations were over, the young men could be sent something to satisfy them. They would all benefit from the treaty in any case.⁹⁰

For the Dakota, chiefs acted only with the consent of their people. It was important for their bands to be well represented, so as to develop a consensus. The commissioners’ demands interfered with development of that consensus. At this impasse, Sleepy Eye, the elder statesman in the Traverse des Sioux region, rose to make a statement: “Your coming and asking me for my country makes me sad; and your saying I am not able to do any thing with my country makes me still more sad. Those who are coming behind are my near relations and I expect certainly to see them here. That is all I have to say. I am going to leave and that is the reason I spoke. (Turning to the other See-see-to-ans he said ‘come let us go.’)”⁹¹

An evening meal among Dakota people gathered for the 1851 treaty negotiation at Traverse des Sioux was recorded by artist Frank B. Mayer on July 20. That day was a Sunday and, according to American custom, the negotiators did not meet.

It is likely Sleepy Eye’s statement was intended to provide a break in the negotiations at an awkward moment—an excuse to defuse the situation. However, at the time the meeting broke up, the commissioners were incensed. Ramsey immediately ordered that no more rations be distributed. Lea announced he would depart down the Minnesota River the next morning. The American flag was “struck and retired from the Council Ground” and plans were made for departure. Toward evening a “committee on the part of the Indians” said they would resume negotiations and disclaimed any intention to show disrespect.⁹²

When negotiations continued two days later, on Monday, July 21, after a break on Sunday, when the commissioners would not have met anyway, Sleepy Eye stated, “We only wanted more time to consider. The young men who made a noise were waiting to have a ball play and thinking the Council over arose and as they did so made the disturbance which we were sorry for.” Governor Ramsey was mollified. They had “a right for further time,” but the manner of their departure “was objected to.” He asked to hear anything the chiefs had to say. Upi Iyahdeya, or Extended Tail Feathers, asked “to know exactly the proposition made to us by the commissioners.” The “chiefs and people” wanted to see “the particulars of your offer for our lands” in writing. Once they had received this paper they would “sit down on the top of the hill above us, consult among ourselves, come to a conclusion about it, and inform you what it is.”⁹³

At this point the treaty journal states that Lea “wrote out in detail the terms as verbally given at the previous meeting of the Council.” The document contained a slightly more precise proposal, describing the territory to be ceded and the location for lands to be set aside for the Indians. It also gave actual money amounts, stating that “say $25,000 or $30,000” would be paid to them to arrange their affairs, prepare for removal, and subsist them in their new lands for a year. Finally, an annuity of $25,000 to $30,000 would be paid “for many years,” part of it in goods and provisions and “other beneficial objects.”⁹⁴

Commissioner Lea then stated that though he had written down his proposition, he wished “to know certainly whether they intend to sell this country and have made up their minds to do so” before “we trouble ourselves further in relation to this business.”⁹⁵

It is unclear how the Dakota could make up their minds about the sale of their land without a more complete description of the treaty terms. Curly Head responded that they wished to sell “and we will give you our country if we are satisfied with your offers for it.” Rather than providing details or the time to review them carefully, Commissioner Lea responded that any treaty “must be done quickly. As men and chiefs, not women and children, they ought to be able to act without delay.” The Dakota were expected to give a definite response at the next meeting. Ramsey too seemed to think they ought to respond to what they had heard so far. If they were not satisfied with the terms, they must inform the commissioner about what they did want for their lands. The commissioners would then take the Dakota proposal into consideration.⁹⁶

On July 22, at 7 AM, the negotiations began again, without any of the preliminaries mentioned on earlier days such as the passing of a pipe. Commissioner Lea asked for a response from the chiefs to the government’s written proposal. Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leader Iyangmani, Running Walker, rose and handed Lea “a paper containing the terms upon which they would agree to sell.” It is unclear what this paper contained, who wrote it, or with whom the Dakota leaders consulted in making it. A similar document, in Henry H. Sibley’s handwriting, exists for the later Mendota treaty, which suggests that traders could also have been involved in preparing the one at Traverse des Sioux. In a later summary of the treaty negotiations, Lea and Ramsey stated, “some few of their own number having been taught to read had impressed them with an idea that their country was of immense value and they at first refused to treat unless the sum of six million dollars was paid them.” No record of this figure appears in the treaty journal, which suggests that some negotiations were taking place outside the council. Commissioner Lea did not seem to anticipate any difficulty in accepting the terms proposed by the Dakota. He stated that the commissioners would look over the proposal “and as soon as we can draw up the necessary documents we will meet again to complete the work and sign the treaty. We will have our goods and medals ready for those who attend on that occasion and who behave well.”⁹⁷

Oddly, Governor Ramsey concluded the day by stating that the Great Father had proposed the treaty “because he is your friend. At any moment, he can have soldiers without number here for the protection of his friends.” The final statement suggests the Dakota’s proposal contained provisions that not all the leaders had wanted. Ramsey may have been assuring the chiefs they would be protected if they signed a document other Dakota did not like. Perhaps this too was a reflection of outside negotiations and manipulation.⁹⁸

The council resumed at noon the next day. Lea reported the commissioners had accepted the Dakota’s proposals and had prepared an English and a Dakota version of the treaty. Specifically, they had drawn up “a paper to be signed by you and ourselves containing the provisions which you have asked us to consent to.” Nothing but “our kind feelings toward the Sioux could have induced us to agree to a treaty so favorable to them.” Lea ordered the treaty read, in English and then in Dakota, by the missionary Stephen R. Riggs. The Dakota document written by Riggs provides important clues about exactly how the Dakota at Traverse des Sioux would have interpreted the treaty and by extension how the Dakota viewed the idea of the sale of land in general.⁹⁹

Following the readings came a short pause, after which Ramsey and Lea both signed the treaty and asked the Dakota leaders to do the same. At this point Sleepy Eye rose to speak. The treaty journal reports that he “showed a disposition to make a speech and arose for that purpose but Col. Lea reminded him that the council was assembled for business not for talk.” There had already been “sufficient time for talk,” but they would “hear him briefly.” Sleepy Eye began by stating that he hoped the Great Father would furnish the Dakota “some beef” and other provisions, “when the year comes to be white,” that is, in the winter. He stated that the “young men” had hoped for a higher price for their land, though he did not mention an amount.

Commissioner Lea’s response suggests a great deal more knowledge of Sleepy Eye’s complaint than was recorded in the treaty journal. He claimed they had been given a treaty that they wanted and at a price “more than Sleepy Eyes has mentioned.” Lea spoke scornfully about the chief, suggesting that “so old a chief as Sleepy Eye who has been to Washington would have understood better what we are paying especially after having had it explained to him so fully. We are paying them in fifty years a great deal more than the amount he says the young men want for the land.” Governor Ramsey joined in heaping scorn on Sleepy Eye, saying the chief “is not a very good hand to manage the business of his people and if it had not been for other Indians wiser and more vigilant they would not have obtained so much as now will be received by the treaty about to be signed.” Insulting Sleepy Eye appears to have been a strategy on Ramsey’s part, designed to undermine his standing among the Dakota, but it reflected a general contempt on the part of the officials for all the Dakota.¹⁰⁰

Treaty of Traverse des Sioux: Three Versions

According to the treaty journal, at a key moment during negotiations at Traverse des Sioux, Commissioner Luke Lea ordered the treaty read aloud in Dakota by the missionary Stephen R. Riggs, who along with the trader Alexander Faribault was an interpreter during the negotiations. The result was a written version of the Dakota version preserved, ever since, in the official treaty record.^v

Translating any English text into Dakota is fraught with difficulties. The Dakota language scholar Carolynn Schommer stated that “the total language structure is much different from the English and no literal translation can be made from either language into the other.” This phenomenon is compounded by the fact that Dakota was an oral language and those who attempted to write it down were, in Schommer’s words, “transforming an oral language into written form.” The task of writing down the Dakota language constituted a transformation of it by people who were not cognizant of the deep cultural importance of Dakota as it was meant to be spoken. The exchange of one Dakota word for an English word is therefore not a simple literal “translation.” This truth becomes even more notable when we consider the text in context of the clashing cultures that encountered each other at the treaty table.^vi

Samuel and Gideon Pond, the first Protestant missionaries to the Dakota, adapted the English alphabet to Dakota sounds in 1834. This first attempt at writing the Dakota language was hampered in that the Ponds’ alphabet was missing a number of the guttural and nasalized sounds common in daily speech. They developed readers and religious teachings and began compiling a dictionary that was the core of what Stephen R. Riggs would publish later. By 1837 many Dakota people were reading and writing in their own language, not only to the missionaries but also to each other.^vii

Riggs, who had been a missionary among the Dakota since the 1830s, had long been interested in learning the Dakota language and in compiling a dictionary. The year following the Treaty of 1851, Riggs was able to get the first version of his dictionary published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. As a missionary, Riggs’s purpose was to learn the language to be able to communicate Christian doctrine in Dakota. His task was rooted both theologically and economically in the eradication of Dakota culture and lifeways and the complete assimilation of the Dakota into the European-American agricultural way of life and property ownership.^viii

In translating Christian concepts into Dakota, Riggs faced many obstacles because of the differences in the belief systems of Europeans and Dakota people. Many words had nuances in English that could not be duplicated in Dakota. For example, he wrote, in regard to the wic̣owoyaḳe, otherwise translated as “declaration, narration, or doctrine,” “We have used this word for chapter,” meaning the chapter of a book. Similarly, Riggs wrote about the word wowakaŋ, which he translated as “something supernatural,” a version of the profound Dakota word wakaŋ, “We have used this word for holiness.” It may have been as close as Riggs could get to the Christian concept, but neither “holiness” nor “supernatural” captured the nuances of the Dakota concept. It appears Riggs was not only a recorder of the Dakota language but a creator of many usages, some of which have persisted after his death.^ix

Riggs faced the same challenges in translating the 1851 treaty. A simple word, like article in reference to a section of the treaty, posed some difficulties. The term Riggs chose, oehde, is associated with the physical action of “setting down” something, from the verb ehde. In his dictionary Riggs translated the noun as “a setting down; a saying, a verse, a sentence,” though here as with other words, he may have sought to add meaning to a Dakota word which did not have the nuances of the English words he wished to attach to it. In other cases he dealt with these challenges by simply leaving out important passages. The language in Article 4 to the effect that $1,360,000 would “remain in trust with the United States, and five per cent interest thereon to be paid, annually, to said Indians for the period of fifty years,…which shall be in full payment of said balance,” which in effect meant that the principal would never be paid to them, was simply omitted in the Dakota-language version.^x

In other cases Riggs made the same kinds of decisions he had in relation to other English words for which there was no Dakota equivalent. A particular problem came from the terms used to refer to the sale of land. Even the Dakota’s experience in the fur trade for almost 150 years had not led them to adopt a cash economy, in which everything had a price and everything could be bought and sold—least of all the land. In fact, as many historians have shown, the gift economy of the fur trade represented an adaptation of Europeans to native practices rather than the other way around. Nothing had prepared the Dakota for the idea that lands could be sold. Goods in the fur trade were exchanged through gift, credit, and generalized reciprocity, in which few goods were exchanged one for one, let alone for a sum of money. Only with the first treaties of the 1830s, in which some payments were made in cash, did the Dakota experience the concept of getting and paying for things with money. And in such cases cash was used almost as soon as it was paid, to buy goods from the traders often present at treaty payments. In any case, it is not clear that by the 1850s money was yet understood as something that could measure all things produced with human effort, as well as those things created by the Master of Life.^xi

Article 2 of the official English version of the treaty stated that the Dakota “agree to cede, and do hereby cede, sell and relinquish to the United States, all their lands in the state of Iowa; and, also all their lands in the territory of Minnesota.” The important English words in this passage are “cede, sell, and relinquish.” The Dakota words Riggs chose to translate this passage and others relating to ceding and selling failed to capture the cultural nuances of the English words, substituting the entirely different nuances of Dakota words. For the word cede Riggs chose erpeyapi. The word like all those in his treaty version was spelled without diacritical marks or special characters. In his dictionary, the word was eḣpeyapi, translated by phrases such as to give up, to throw away, to put aside, to leave, to forsake, and to lose, and like many Dakota verbs is dependent upon context for its interpretation. This range of meanings shows in a pronounced way the difficulty of translation.^xii

What understanding would the Dakota have had of how one might abandon the land considered to be a relative? In the past the Dakota had spoken in diplomacy of sharing land or acquiescing in its occupation by the Ojibwe, but it is hard to imagine a full understanding of how one might throw land away. The difficulty of using the term is further demonstrated by the fact that Riggs also used it in the provision of Article 4 to communicate that $12,000 of the total treaty fund would be dedicated, that is “set aside,” and applied to agricultural expenses. Exactly how would the Dakota word contain the meanings of the English word relating to land cessions? More likely, since the English word cede is associated inextricably with property rights, it may have been impossible to find a word in Dakota which adequately conveyed its meaning since the Dakota did not recognize the idea of property rights over land.

As for the word sale, Riggs chose wiyopekiya, spelled the same way in the dictionary, with that meaning. The word was a version of iyopekiya, which Riggs translated as meaning “to reprove, chide, to correct, punish, to trade for something else, exchange.” Here too it is difficult to recognize the kinds of hands-off economic exchanges that typify the word used in English. Instead it appears to communicate the full range of reciprocal exchanges the Dakota had had with traders for almost two centuries. Such exchanges would have fit within the concept of Anglo-American property law but are distinct from the Anglo-American traditional practice in relating to “real property,” that is, land.^xiii

The confusion about the Dakota terminology for selling and ceding land is shown starkly in a later interpretation of the treaty given by Tataŋka Naẓiŋhaŋ (Standing Buffalo), a chief of the Sisituŋwaŋ of Lake Traverse, son of 1851 treaty signer Wic̣aŋḣpi Ite (Star Face), and namesake of an earlier Lake Traverse chief. In a statement recorded by a Catholic priest in 1864, Tataŋka Naẓiŋhaŋ said, “I loved my lands, it was on them that I had been raised and fed, it was the land of my fathers. I therefore had reason to love it. In the meantime the Americans came and demanded my lands[.] I at once acceded for I loved the Americans[.] I sold my lands for fifty years.” Tataŋka Naẓiŋhaŋ listed other features of the treaty, suggesting that he had been at the negotiation and was familiar with the contents of the treaty. Fifty years, of course, was the duration of the annuity payments. This suggests, given the difficulty of communicating the very idea of land sale, a reasonable understanding of the treaty as essentially a fifty-year lease—similar in some respects to the earlier view of the Treaty of 1805. Given that the U.S. government planned to keep the principal amount from which the interest was to be paid to the Dakota in annuities, there was a real symmetry of understanding, though one not acknowledged by the white negotiators.^xiv

Another revealing facet of Riggs’s treaty translation concerns the notorious provision in the first phrase of the first provision of Article 4 that set aside $275,000 to allow the Upper bands of Dakota “to enable them to settle their affairs” prior to their removal from the lands ceded. This opening wedge allowed the traders to profit from the treaty despite a law that prevented such payments for trade debts. Riggs rendered the phrase in Dakota as “tuwewe cante en wicayuzapi token owicakiranpi kte cinhan okihiwicaye kta,” which would translate into English literally as “whoever they treated badly they will hold them in their hearts” or perhaps “make amends to.” It can be seen here that Riggs in trying to communicate the innocuous phrase “settle their affairs” managed to bring in the concept of a debt owed by the Dakota. While it did not refer directly to the traders, it does in an important sense put back into the treaty the concept of debt that was expressly forbidden by Congress. The fact that Riggs wrote the treaty in this way suggests he cannot have been unfamiliar with the so-called trader’s paper that Dakota people were asked to sign after signing the treaty itself. This complicity is something he undoubtedly had in common with most of the other officials present at Traverse des Sioux, who willfully participated in the corruption of the treaty for their own selfish ends. None of them appear to have truly appreciated the Dakota’s desire to simply continue to live in their homelands.

In summary, a look at Riggs’s translation of the treaty into Dakota raises the question of whether the Dakota, hearing the treaty being read out at Traverse des Sioux, could possibly have understood that it meant they would be totally separated from their ancestral homeland in which was rooted their identity, culture, and language. They certainly understood that the treaty would open the way for a further influx of European settlers, but to suggest, as the idea of “cede” and “sell” do in an English language context that includes Anglo-American real property principles, that possession to the exclusion of all others was fully understood by the Dakota could only have meant that they were severing their relationship with the land to which they were deeply related. The treaty would effect a divorce of the Dakota people and the land that gave them birth and life. Such an understanding is hard to imagine given the expression of deep kinship with the land found in the Dakota language, to say nothing of the fact that the treaty included promises of the Dakota remaining on their homeland, though confined to a narrow reservation along the Minnesota River. Without that provision in Article 3 which promised, in the supplemental Article 3 (see below) in a different form, to reserve a portion of the land they “ceded” for their homes, it is hard to imagine the Dakota would have agreed to the treaty at all, even in the face of the difficult circumstances in which they found themselves at the treaty table.

Printed Treaty Language

Articles of a treaty made and concluded at Traverse des Sioux, upon the Minnesota River, in the Territory of Minnesota, on the twenty-third day of July, eighteen hundred and fifty-one, between the United States of America, by Luke Lea, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Alexander Ramsey, governor and ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs in said Territory, commissioners duly appointed for that purpose, and See-see-toan and Wah-pay-toan bands of Dakota or Sioux Indians.

Copy, in the Dakota Language, of a Treaty Between the United States of America and the Wah-pay-toan and See-see-toan bands of the Dakota or Sioux Indians. Concluded at Traverse des Sioux. Minnesota Territory July 23d AD. 1851

Minisota Makoce, Minisota wakpa ohna Oiyuwege eciyapi kin hen, Canpaxa wi anpetu iwikcemna nonpa sanpa yamni, omaka kektopawinge wanjidan sanpa opawinge xahdogan sanpa wikcemna zaptan sam wanjidan, Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi nom, unma Luke Lea eciyapi, Ikcewicaxta oyate kin awanyagkiyapi kin hee, qa unma ix Alexander Ramsey Minisota makoce en Wicaxtayatapi qa Ikcewicaxta en unpi kin atayedan awanwicayake cin, hena oza Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanka uwicaxi; hena eepi qa Dakota Warpetonwan oyate Sisitonwan ko mniciyapi qa makoce aiapi, wokiconze kagapi qa tanyan yuxtanpi. Oehde kin hena kaketu.

English Translation of Dakota version

Minnesota Country, on the Minnesota River at Traverse des Sioux July 23rd, 1851, two United States officials, one called Luke Lea, who looks after the Indian people, and the other Alexander Ramsey, the leader of Minnesota Country and who looks after all of the Indians there, were both asked by the United States government to come, they are here, and the Wahpeton and Sisseton Dakota people also, gathered and spoke about the land, they made an agreement and finished it well. So these are the settlements.

ARTICLE 1.

It is stipulated and solemnly agreed that the peace and friendship now so happily existing between the United States and the aforesaid bands of Indians, shall be perpetual.

Oehde I.

Isantanka Oyate qa Dakota Warpetonwan qa Sisitonwan ewicakiyapi kin hena okiciciyapi qa odakonkiciyapi kin ohinniyan detanhan cantekiciyuzapi kta e nakaha awicakehan wakiconzapi qa yuxtanpi.

Setting Down I.

The people of the United States and the Wahpeton and Sisseton Dakota people, those named, help each other and are allied with each other, earlier this day they purposefully resolved and concluded forever from this time to hold each other’s hearts.

ARTICLE 2.

The said See-see-toan and Wah-pay-toan bands of Dakota or Sioux Indians, agree to cede, and do hereby cede, sell, and relinquish to the United States, all their lands in the State of Iowa; and, also all their lands in the Territory of Minnesota, lying east of the following line, to wit: Beginning at the junction of the Buffalo River with the Red River of the North; thence along the western bank of said Red River of the North, to the mouth of the Sioux Wood River; thence along the western bank of said Sioux Wood River to Lake Traverse; thence, along the western shore of said lake, to the southern extremity thereof; thence in a direct line, to the junction of Kampeska Lake with the Tchan-kas-an-data, or Sioux River; thence along the western bank of said river to its point of intersection with the northern line of the State of Iowa; including all the islands in said rivers and lake.

Oehde II.

Dakota Sisitonwan oyate Warpetonwan ko Makoce wiyopekiyapi qa deciyatanhan erpeyapi qa Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanki qupi, makoce wan Iowa eciyapi kin tohanyan tawapi hecinhan, qa Minisota makoce kin en, Tatanka kagapi wakpadan mdote kin hetanhan aupi qa Rara ohna tatowam ayapi, Caninkpa wakpa ecen ayapi, qa Mdehdakinyan wiyorpeyatanhan huta kin ecen ayapi, qa Ptansinta etanhan owotanna ayapi ecen Kampeska mde mdote kin hen Wakpa Ipakxan iyorpeyapi, qa wakpa kin he ohn ayapi qa Ipakxan kin hehan aipi; wakpa qa mde kin ohna wita kin hena owasin koya; icagopi kin hetanhan makoce iwiyohiyanpatanhan wanke cin ocowasin kapi.

Setting Down II.

The Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota people together sell and from this place give up land and give it to the United States government: whatever land in Iowa that is theirs, and the land in Minnesota. They mean all the land continuing eastward from the lines coming from where the mouth of Buffalo effigy creek and the falls upstream go together, along the Woods end river from the western shore of Lake Traverse, going straight from Ottertail, to where the mouth of Kampeska lake and the River of the Bend meet, and on through the river and arrive at the Bend; including all those islands in the rivers and the lakes.

ARTICLE 3.

[This language agreed upon at Traverse des Sioux was stricken by the U.S. Senate.]

In part consideration of the foregoing cession the United States do hereby set apart for the future occupancy and home of the Dakota Indians, parties to this treaty, to be held by them as Indian lands are held, all that tract of country on either side of the Minnesota river, from the western boundary of the lands herein ceded, east to the Tchay-tam-bay river on the north and to the Yellow Medicine river on the south side—to extend on each side a distance of not less than ten miles from the general course of said river: the boundaries of said tract to be marked out by as straight lines as practicable, whenever deemed expedient by the President, and in such manner as he shall direct.

Oehde III.

Dakota makoce tawapi erpeyapi kin heon etanhan makoce onxpa en ounyanpi kta qa ohna tipi maga ko ic̣icagapi kta e Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanka wicaqu; Ikcewicaxta makoce yuhapi kin hecen hduhapi kta; wiyorpeyata icagopi kin hetanhan aupi, Wakpa Minisota anokatanhan wiyutapi hanska wikcemna (anokatanhan wiyotanhan imani) hecen aupi qa Pejihutazi qapi mdote kin etanhan wiyutapi wikcemna hen iyorpeyapi; qa unma eciyatanhan Cetanbe wakpa mdote kin etanhan wiyutapi wikcemna hen iyorpeyapi, qa wakpa kin hena ohnahna ayapi qa ecen wakpa Minisota iyahdeyapi kta. Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanka kin tohan econpi kta iyecetu dake c̣a econwicaxi kinhan hecen owotanna iyutapi kta.

Setting Down III.

Because the Dakota give up their land, they will be sent to live on a piece of land that the United States government gives them and they will make houses and fields for themselves. The Indians will keep the lands they have from a western line coming ten miles long on both sides of the Minnesota River (on both sides walking south) they mean ten miles from where they meet at the mouth of the Yellow Medicine; and on the other side ten miles from where they meet at the mouth of the Sparrow hawk river, and where those rivers go together and reach the Minnesota River. When the United States President demands and orders them to do so, then they will measure it straight.

The first page of the Stephen R. Riggs translation of the 1851 Traverse des Sioux treaty begins with the words Mini Sota Makoce, chosen to translate the phrase Minnesota Territory.

ARTICLE 4.

In further and full consideration of said cession, the United States agree to pay to said Indians the sum of one million six hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars ($1,665,000,) at the several times, in the manner and for the purposes following, to wit:

1st. To the chiefs of the said bands, to enable them to settle their affairs and comply with their present just engagement; and in consideration of their removing themselves to the country set apart for them as above, which they agree to do within two years, or sooner, if required by the President, without further cost or expense to the United States, and in consideration of their subsisting themselves the first year after their removal, which they agree to do without further cost or expense on the part of the United States, the sum of two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, $275,000): Provided, That said sum shall be paid to the chiefs in such manner as they, hereafter, in open council shall request, and as soon after the removal of said Indians to the home set apart for them, as the necessary appropriation therefor shall be made by Congress.

2d. To be laid out under the direction of the President for the establishment of manual-labor schools; the erection of mills and blacksmith shops, opening farms, fencing and breaking land, and for such other beneficial objects as may be deemed most conducive to the prosperity and happiness of said Indians, thirty thousand dollars, ($30,000.) The balance of said sum of one million six hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, ($1,665,000,) to wit: one million three hundred and sixty thousand dollars ($1,360,000) to remain in trust with the United States, and five per cent interest thereon to be paid, annually, to said Indians for the period of fifty years, commencing the first day of July, eighteen hundred and fifty-two (1852,) which shall be in full payment of said balance, principal and interest, the said payment to be applied under the direction of the President, as follows, to wit:

3d. For a general agricultural improvement and civilization fund, the sum of twelve thousand dollars, ($12,000.)

4th. For educational purposes, the sum of six thousand dollars, ($6,000.)

5th. For the purchase of goods and provisions, the sum of ten thousand dollars, ($10,000.)

6th. For money annuity, the sum of forty thousand dollars, ($40,000.)

Oehde IV.

Hehan makoce erpeyapi kin heon etanhan Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanka Dakota kakenken ecawicakicon kta, qa kakenken wicakicicajuju kta.

1. Warpetonwan Sisitonwan ko, Wicaxayatapi wicayuhapi taku econpi kta hecinhan hduxtan wicakiye kta, qa tuwewe cante en wicayuzapi token owicakiranpi kte cinhan okihiwicaye kta; qa makoce wicaqupi kin ekta iyotankapi kta, detanhan waniyetu nonpa qa ix iyokpani, Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi tanka econwicaxi kinhan econpi kta; qa toic̣ikxupi kin on taku sanpa wokajuju dapi kte xni; qa nakun kta iyotankapi kinhan waniyetu tokaheya on taku yutapi opic̣itunpi kta; qa heon taku sanpa wokajuju dapi kte xni; hena owasin okihiwicaye kta e on mazaska kektopawinge ece opawinge nonpa sanpa kektopawinge wikcemna xakowin sanpa kektopawinge zaptan. Tohan Dakota ekta iyotankapi qa mazaska iyog ehnakapi kinhan hehan Wicaxtayatapi wicayuhapi kin hena he wicaqupi kta.

2. Tipi ohna waonspe wicakiyapi kta, wiyutpan tipi, canbasdesdeca tipi, mazakaga tipi ko kagapi kta qa maga wicakicagapi kta, qa token Dakota tanyan unpi kta naceca, on owicakiyapi kta mazaska kektopawinge wikcemna yamni erpeyapi kta.

3. Qa nakun makoce on tanyan kajujupi kta, omaka eca kakenken econpi kta ce; Waxunpa wi 1852 hetanhan waniyetu wikcemna zaptan hehanyan.

(A.) Maga ikicanye kin hena, wanuyanpi opetunpi kta, qa taku hecekcen owasin on mazaska kektopawinge akenonpa erpeyapi kta.

(B.) Waonspekiyapi kin on mazaska kektopawinge xakpe

(C.) Woyuha qa taku yutapi opetonpi kta on mazaska kektopawinge wikcemna.

(D.) Mazaska ece omaka eca wicaqupi kta kektopawinge wikcemna topa.

Setting Down IV.

Then because they gave up the land, the United States government will do this for the Dakota, and will pay them like this:

1. The leaders of the Wahpeton and Sisseton will be allowed to finish up their affairs, and will be able to make amends to whoever was treated badly; and they will go to land they were given in two years or less from now, when the United States government orders them, they will do it; and transport themselves and not demand additional payment; and when they settle there for the first year they will buy their own food; and therefore will not demand any additional payment; to enable them to do all these things, $275,000. When the Dakota settle there and the money is put aside, then the officials will give it to them.

2. For building schools, mill houses, saw mills, and blacksmiths, and for making fields for themselves, and however they might live well, they will be helped, $30,000 will be put aside.

3. And also for the land, they will be paid well every year, from July 1852, for 50 years.

(A.) For buying tame animals and field implements, and all things like that, $12,000 will be put aside.

(B.) For the teachers, $6,000.

(C.) For possessions and food they will buy, $10,000

(D.) Money to give them every year, $40,000.

ARTICLE 5.

The laws of the United States, prohibiting the introduction and sale of spirituous liquors in the Indian country shall be in full force and effect throughout the territory hereby ceded and lying in Minnesota until otherwise directed by Congress or the President of the United States.

Oehde V.

Isantanka wicoope eciyatanhan, Ikcewicaxta tamakoce kin en mini wakan aupi qa wiyopekiyapi kte cin he terindapi ece kin, makoce nakaha opetonpi tinskoya Minisota eciyapi, hinskoya hen hecetu kte; tohanyan Isantanka omniciye tanka qa ix Wicaxtayatapi tanka togye wakiconzapi xni hehanyan.

Setting Down V.

From American laws, selling and bringing liquor into the Indians’ land is forbidden, all around these lands newly bought in Minnesota; until Congress or United States officials decide differently.

ARTICLE 6.

Rules and regulations to protect the rights of persons and property among the Indians, parties to this treaty, and adapted to their condition and wants, may be prescribed and enforced in such manner as the President or the Congress of the United States, from time to time, shall direct.

In testimony whereof, the said Commissioners, Luke Lea and Alexander Ramsey, and the undersigned Chiefs and Headmen of the aforesaid See-see-toan and Wah-pay-toan bands of Dakota or Sioux Indians, have hereunto subscribed their names and affixed their seals, in duplicate, at Traverse des Sioux, Territory of Minnesota, this twenty-third day of July, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one.

Oehde VI.

Qa Dakota tona wowapi kin de yutanpi qa opapi kin hena owasin iye tanatayedan tanyan unpi kta, tawarpaya xuktanka ko tanyan hduhapi kta e heon woope qa wicokiconze, tona on waxteya unpi kta iyececa, hena wicakicagapi kta qa iyecetu wicakiciciyapi kta; Wicaxtayatapi tanka qa omniciye tanka kin tokenken qa tonhanhan eyapi kinhan.

Nakaha wicaunkapi kta e heon Isantanka Wicaxtayatapi, Luke Lea eciyapi qa Alexander Ramsey eciyapi, qa Dakota Warpetonwan qa Sisitowan wicaxtayatapi akicita wicayuhapi ko wowapi kin de yutanpi qa caje ic̣icagapi. Oiyuwege ekta Minisota makoce kin en omaka 1851, Canpaxa wi, anpetu iwikcemna nonpa sanpa yamni.

Setting Down VI.

And those Dakota who honor and follow this treaty, all of them individually will be well taken care of also their belongings and horses laws and rights for taking good care of them will be made good for them, the President and Congress will decide how and for how long those things will be provided and rights will be given.

Now we are all truthful, therefore the United States officials, named Luke Lea and Alexander Ramsey, and Wahpeton and Sisseton Dakota leaders and soldiers also honor this treaty and write their names. At Traverse des Sioux in Minnesota country in the year 1851, the 23rd day of July.

At this point the chiefs and headmen were called forward to sign the treaty. One of them, Upi Iyahdeya, or Extended Tail Feathers, spoke, saying that contrary to the commissioners’ thinking, the government was not offering a great amount for their lands: “All we get for them will at last belong to the white man. The money comes to us but will all go to the white man who trades with us.” There was no response to this comment, but the truth of what he said would soon be demonstrated.¹⁰¹

According to the language of the treaty, in return for their land cession the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ received 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. In addition they would receive the equivalent of $1,665,000. Of this, $30,000 was to be spent to establish schools, blacksmith shops, and mills and to open farms on the new reservation. A principal of $1,360,000 was to bear interest at a rate of 5 percent for a period of fifty years, with interest 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; $6,000 for education.¹⁰²

Finally, a sum of $275,000 was set aside to pay “to the chiefs of the said bands, to enable them to settle their affairs and comply with their present just engagement; and in consideration of their removing themselves to the country set apart for them as above, which they agree to do within two years, or sooner, if required by the President, without further cost or expense to the United States, and in consideration of their subsisting themselves the first year after their removal, which they agree to do without further cost or expense on the part of the United States.” In the original proposal made by the commissioners, the amount to be spent for the purpose of removal had been $25,000 or $30,000: this amount increased tenfold at some unrecorded point in the treaty process.

Despite language suggesting this provision “to settle their affairs”—that is, to pay off supposed debts owed the traders—was designed to benefit the Dakota, it was instead intended to be the trigger that would earn the traders the windfall they had hoped for from the treaty. This was exactly the way it worked.¹⁰³

After signing the treaty, each Dakota leader was led to a nearby barrel on which sat a document prepared by the traders. By its terms, the signatories acknowledged their debts to the traders and “half-breeds” and pledged themselves as representatives of their respective bands to pay those obligations. As Folwell noted, the document had not been read or explained in open council. Many, including white observers at the treaty table, had no idea what the document was. Missionary Thomas Williamson believed it was a third copy of the treaty. At the time the document was signed, it contained no schedule of the debts involved, though this was added shortly after the signing. Initially the amounts claimed added up to over $431,000, but the total was scaled back to $210,000 to fit within the constraints allowed in the treaty. Henry Sibley along with other traders helped prepare the schedule. What it meant was that the amount set aside for the benefit of the Dakota would go directly to the traders.¹⁰⁴

Historical accounts of the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux tell that Dakota chiefs, after signing the document, were led to the head of a nearby barrel, where they were asked to sign another document, previously unknown to them, granting a large amount of money to traders. Frank B. Mayer’s sketch of the proceedings shows at center a conspicuous barrel, perhaps containing water for the negotiators.

After praising Dakota leaders for their wisdom and vigilance, the commissioners themselves, who at various points had insisted the issue of debts to be between the Dakota and the traders, allowed the signing of the traders’ document to occur. No reference was made to it in the treaty journal. Although the traders later claimed the contents were well known to the Dakota, Indian agent Nathaniel McLean, observing the signing of the document, asked to have it explained but was rebuffed by the commissioners “because it would make a disturbance.” The agent believed that had the paper been explained, the Dakota would not have signed it.¹⁰⁵

During the treaty signing itself, the commissioners exhausted their supply of medals but promised to deliver them to the leaders who did not receive them. A few more remarks were exchanged between the leaders and the commissioners. Curly Head complained about earlier treaties that had allowed a de facto transfer of land from the Dakota to the Ojibwe: “A great deal of our country was sold by the Chippewas without our consent and our Father promised to make an arrangement about it.” He added that “the Winnebagoes occupy the country,” referring to lands sold by the Ojibwe for the Ho-Chunk reservation on the west bank of the Mississippi River, suggesting the Dakota had not agreed on the boundary between Ojibwe and Dakota there. Ramsey evaded the question, stating that the Dakota had now sold their lands west of the Mississippi. Lea quickly returned to a happier topic, the conclusion of the treaty, which he described as the “good treaty” they had been promised. If the Dakota remained faithful to the treaty, the government would do the same. He had come among them “a stranger and as a friend I leave you with the kindest feelings.” He bid them farewell.

Ramsey concluded by giving a lengthy speech—two pages long in the treaty journal—painting a rosy picture of the Dakota’s future, their farms, schools, and the many services they would receive from the treaty. After further discussion, the commissioners left and presents were distributed to the gathered Dakota.

1851

Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota with the Sisseton and Wahpeton and Wahpekute and Mdewakanton, respectively, cede twenty-four million acres in southern Minnesota.

With the treaty concluded at Traverse des Sioux, the stage was set for replication of its terms with the lower tribes. On July 25 the commissioners arrived in Mendota, lodging at the home of trader Jean-Baptiste Faribault. Negotiations began with Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ and Waḣpekute leaders on July 29. A pipe was passed to those gathered in a room of Faribault’s house. In addition to Alexander Faribault, Jean-Baptiste’s son, now serving as interpreters were Philander Prescott and Gideon Pond, who had not been at Traverse des Sioux. Governor Ramsey began by stating his purpose to advise the Great Father’s children “for their good.” It was time for his red children to dispose of “the lands you own,” so that his agents could transfer them to his white children. These lands had ceased being “of much value” to the Dakota because the game was gone and would be more valuable to the Great Father’s white children. Now that the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ had signed the treaty at Traverse des Sioux, if those gathered in Mendota did not sell their lands they would be surrounded by whites. Thus, the negotiations should be of particular interest to them. Ramsey then introduced Commissioner Lea.¹⁰⁶

Lea began by saying that he was a “friend to the red man,” as was the Great Father in Washington. Every year their “white brethren” were “thickening” around them. It would be to their benefit if they were to give “his white children” lands “for their homes.” But the Great Father also wanted to provide the Dakota with “a good home.” The Dakota now had an opportunity to sell their lands and select a new location on the Minnesota River, between the Yellow Medicine River, where the homes of the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ would begin, and “the Tchaay-tan-bay [C̣Letaŋbe, Hatching Hawk, now Hawk Creek] and Tchappah [C̣apa, or Beaver Creek] Rivers.” In addition to providing them with “a comfortable home,” the Great Father was willing to supply the Dakota with a large sum of money for their land, Lea said, offering them $800,000 as well as money to assist them when they arrived at their new homes and to pay for schools, mills, blacksmith shops, and farms, as well as other benefits.¹⁰⁷

Lea would not ask them to sign a treaty if it was not for their own good. He provided evidence from his own life: “I love the home where I was born and spent my boyish days, as much as you do the country where you lived,” but he had moved two or three times in his life, each time farther than they were being asked to go. Even if they moved they would still be living on lands “that have for centuries belonged to the great Dakota nation.” Lea expected they would want to consider the offer before responding, and he suggested meeting again the next day. The interpreter would hand them the written proposal, although Lea did not state whether it was in Dakota or English.¹⁰⁸

After Lea had spoken, Chief Wabasha rose and reminded the commissioners of unanswered questions about earlier treaties. As he had stated at the failed treaty negotiations in 1849, there were still “some funds laying back” in the hand of his Great Father, a reference to the so-called educational fund from the Treaty of 1837. The Dakota were anxious to “get that which is due them before they do anything.” Lea responded that if they were able to reach agreement about a new treaty, “no doubt all can be satisfied in reference to the back money.”¹⁰⁹

At the end of the meeting Wabasha requested that the next day’s council be held outdoors instead of in the stuffy room. A large arbor was constructed on Oheyawahi (Pilot Knob), “immediately above the landing,” a location with “a fine view of Fort Snelling and the beautiful surrounding country,” on a site which also happened to be culturally important for the Dakota people. The commissioners sat at tables with the chiefs around them in a semicircle, and when the council resumed at three o’clock Commissioner Lea asked for the Dakota’s response to the offer. Wabasha stood and said the chiefs, soldiers, women, and children had heard what Lea had said the day before and had considered the proposal. He said, “We…now return it. I have nothing more to say.” Lea asked for any response from seven or eight other Dakota leaders, “all chiefs of equal rank.” The treaty journal reported, “Here there was a long pause and no reply.”¹¹⁰

At this point Governor Ramsey suggested adjourning the council to give the Dakota further opportunity to discuss the subject. Lea expected them to meet and discuss things and then arrive at a speedy conclusion. He noted that he was a long way from home and was obliged to leave in a few days. He advised them of the importance of making up their minds as soon as practicable. In fact, Lea had been on leave from his work in Washington since early June and did not return to Washington until the end of August. As for Ramsey, he left late in August along with others involved in the Dakota treaties to go to Pembina, on the Red River near the Canadian border, to sign a treaty with the Ojibwe for a land cession in that region.¹¹¹

Wakute responded to Lea’s impatience: “Our habits are different from those of the whites and when we have anything to consider it takes us a long time.” Lea responded that he understood but that the subject had been “before them a long time” and they were chiefs and men and not women and children. He wished them to be prepared to give an answer the next day.¹¹²

On July 31 at three o’clock the council resumed with Wabasha indicating that some of the chiefs might have something to say. The journal notes, “Here ensued a long and on the part of the chiefs, apparently constrained silence.” Finally Ta Oyate Duta or Little Crow rose and reiterated the questions raised by Wabasha about the fund from the 1837 treaty. Chiefs who were older than he, who had been in Washington at the negotiations for the Treaty of 1837, were promised a settlement but had not received it, he said: “These men sit still and say nothing.” They desired to have the money “laid down upon us. It is money due on the old treaty and I think it should be paid and we do not want to talk about a new treaty unless it is all paid.”¹¹³

Commissioner Lea now spoke in detail about the 1837 treaty, stating that government officials had understood the money would be paid “for the benefit of their children” but “the Dakotas thought otherwise”—an unfortunate difference of opinion. The Great Father had not wanted to hold back anything. He regretted the difficulty the Dakota had faced and was anxious “now to make a treaty that will release them from this difficulty.” With this new treaty, there would be no difference of opinion. Once they signed, they would be able to “arrange satisfactorily the money matter.” Ramsey added that if the treaty were completed then the officials could “be justified in paying you the money, as much of it will be paid down to you as will be equal to your usual cash annuities for three years.”¹¹⁴

Ramsey hinted that the commission had come with every intention of paying the funds due under the 1837 provision, but they were using them as leverage to pressure the Dakota into making a new treaty. According to Ramsey, “to get the money ready and every thing arranged to pay it will take a good while and we may as well therefore proceed with the treaty.” In response, Ta Oyate Duta—who may not have realized the commissioners actually had the money there, intending to pay if the Dakota signed the treaty—stated that they would “talk of nothing else but money if it is until next spring. That lies in the way of a treaty.” In response, Ramsey promised they would be paid as soon as they finished the treaty. If they signed the treaty the next day, they would be paid the following day. He hoped this plan would satisfy them and suggested going back to discussions of the new treaty. The interpreter was asked to explain the treaty provisions. Apparently the offer about the money was acceptable, although no Dakota leader rose to speak. The council was adjourned.¹¹⁵

On August 1, the Dakota sent word that they were willing to resume. The council began at four o’clock. Wakute had been appointed to speak for the other leaders, but he declined, asking only to listen. A long silence ensued. Commissioner Lea rose to urge them to discuss the treaty. He reemphasized that the treaty was for their own good and he would not encourage them to make a treaty that was not. He predicted trouble if they did not sign. He would return to Washington, and if trouble occurred he would feel sorry for them, but they would only have themselves to blame for opposing the Great Father’s wishes. He repeated earlier statements about the Great Father’s desire that they have a “comfortable home” for “themselves and their posterity.” Ramsey suggested that while the younger men might not think it so, the elders could see that the treaty was a means of improving their lives. The elders should without hesitation accept the offer. As he had earlier at Traverse des Sioux, Ramsey promised the government would protect the headmen from any consequences they might face in doing anything “to save their tribe from difficulties and to carry out the benevolent wishes of their Great Father.” Commissioner Lea interpreted their silence to mean they did not wish to sell their lands. This decision would sadden the heart of their Great Father. The council adjourned.¹¹⁶

For several days the council did not meet, while, according to the treaty journal, time was “profitably spent in maturing the terms of a treaty nearly acceptable to both parties.” As with the treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the process was not recorded. A one-page document entitled “Proposition of the Mendaywakanton and Wakpakoota Sioux to the U.S. Commissioners,” in the handwriting of Henry H. Sibley, suggests that he and other traders were involved in bringing about an agreement. The document contained familiar provisions. One way or another, the process, presumably with private negotiation, resulted in a treaty virtually identical to that signed at Traverse des Sioux. On August 5 the council began with an apparent understanding that the treaty would be signed. However, Tac̣aŋku Waṡte or Good Road indicated that the Dakota wished to discuss certain matters first. Commissioner Lea preempted this request, stating that the treaty had been prepared “in pursuance of the terms agreed upon” and was now ready to be signed. He called for the treaty to be read by the secretary in English and “explained” in Dakota by Gideon Pond.¹¹⁷

Oheyawahi, “The Place Much Visited” / Pilot Knob, Mendota Heights

This hill, located opposite Fort Snelling, is a sacred site and an ancient Dakota burial place, possibly the same site mentioned by Zebulon Pike on his arrival at Pike Island in 1805. The hill is considered a sacred place for several reasons, in part because of its associations with the underwater being Uŋkteḣi. According to an account recorded by missionary Samuel Pond, the hill was created when Uŋkteḣi, chasing another creature, plowed into the bank and raised up the hill. The health-giving Wakaŋ Wac̣ip̣i, or medicine ceremony, was sometimes performed on the hill. Explorer Joseph Nicollet wrote of seeing such a ceremony there in 1837. The ritual teachings of the Wakaŋ Wac̣ip̣i were said to have come from Uŋkteḣi.^xv

Seth Eastman, a soldier and an artist, painted at least one view of burial scaffolds on the summit of Pilot Knob in the 1840s as well as an image showing a medicine ceremony that may also have taken place on the hill. The English name refers to the knob-like top, useful for navigation. Many visitors to the hill from the 1820s to 1850s remarked on the extensive and impressive view from its heights, from which the growing downtowns of both Minneapolis and St. Paul were visible. Some early visitors described hearing the rush of water at St. Anthony Falls from the hill.

Located within the sacred district of Bdote, Oheyawahi was not the site of permanent or seasonal villages, though the area was often visited by Dakota. According to Dakota elder Ta Ṡuŋka Wakiŋyaŋ Ohitika Chris Leith, living on a sacred site was not advised. He explained that such places served as cemeteries because they were sacred. There was “a lot of energy in that area…There’s a vortex energy there, that’s why, and the Dakota nation held it sacred.” People knew that burials placed in such a sacred space would be left alone. If someone tried to build something there, a housing development for example, it would not last. In a pipe ceremony Leith led with Chief Arvol Looking Horse on the north slope of the hill in March 2004, the hill was given a new name: Wotakuye Paha, “the hill of all the relatives.” At the time Leith stated, “We have a lot of relatives buried here. That’s why all these years people have prayed. People asked me to come there—to pray for them.”^xvi

Seth Eastman painted the sacred Dakota hill known as Oheyawahi or Pilot Knob, with its burial scaffolds on the top, in a view from below at the mouth of the Minnesota River, which enters at right.

Throughout the nineteenth century the hill had a characteristic mound-like top. As far as is known the form was natural. In the late 1920s the designers of Acacia Cemetery, located on a portion of the hill, removed the top twenty feet, so its original form cannot be verified. Between 2003 and 2008, successful efforts were made to preserve another district of the hill as a public park. Efforts are currently under way to restore the native oak savanna. In recent years a number of Dakota events and ceremonies have been celebrated on the hill.^xvii

In 2010, the view from Oheyawahi/Pilot Knob toward the city of Minneapolis, with Fort Snelling in the intervening space, was very different from what would have been seen 150 years before. Today the northern part of the hill has been protected from development and efforts are under way to restore native vegetation.

Why the document in Dakota was “explained” at this meeting rather than simply read, as had been done with the earlier treaty at Traverse des Sioux, is not clear. It may be that Pond, assuming he was shown the Dakota document written by Riggs, realized that a direct translation would not have adequately conveyed the differences in cultural meaning between the English terms and the Dakota ones, especially in relation to the concept of land sale. Unfortunately, no record of Pond’s explanation has survived.

Ramsey asked the chiefs to begin signing the document, but discussion ensued that raises questions about whether the treaty as read had actually been discussed with the chiefs earlier. Wabasha debated whether the treaty provisions were for the good of the Dakota. The statements about farmers, schools, physicians, traders, and “half-breeds” were similar to those in the Treaty of 1837, which had not truly benefited the Dakota. And the place named for their reservation was prairie country, which was not suited to them. He wished to remain in their lands to receive the benefits promised under the previous treaty, until those benefits expired.¹¹⁸

In response Commissioner Lea sought to undermine Wabasha in the eyes of his own people. He accused Wabasha of “speaking with a forked tongue” and trying to deceive the other Indians. Lea did not expect to revise the treaty to suit him personally. Was that any way for a chief to act? Ramsey again asked for the chiefs to sign the treaty. Wasu Wic̣aṡtaṡni, known as Bad Hail, and Ṡakp̣e requested approval of benefits the chiefs had sought in the 1837 treaty, including the land set aside for Scott Campbell that had been stricken from the treaty by the Senate. Lea responded that the Great Father had instructed his agents not to include benefits to traders and others in treaties, a reference to the rule the traders were actively seeking to undermine both at Traverse des Sioux and Mendota. Lea noted, accurately, that the Dakota could pay benefits to anyone they wanted with the money they would receive from the treaty.¹¹⁹

Various chiefs now questioned the reservation’s boundaries. Ta Oyate Duta wished it extended down the Minnesota River to Traverse des Sioux. A soldier in Ṡakp̣e’s band asked that it include Big Lake on Falls Creek, an unidentified location, adding that there were no objections to other parts of the treaty. Ramsey agreed to change the boundary to extend to Little Rock River (now Little Rock Creek in present-day Nicollet County). Wakute made known his fears about how the treaty might be changed after it was signed, recalling that in the earlier treaty good things were altered by Congress after the Dakota returned to Minnesota: it was “very different from what they had been told and all were shamed.” He added his preference for the area of Pine Island (Goodhue County) to be included in the reservation, but this sideline allowed Ramsey to ignore concerns about how the treaty might be changed. He did, however, note that they would be allowed to “hunt over the large country you sell just as you hunted before” because whites would not need it for many years. He then drew the discussion to a close: “a great deal could be talked about but it is useless to say more. You must have confidence in us and in your Great Father.”¹²⁰

Still, further discussion ensued about the reservation boundaries and the general nature of the treaty. A sticking point appeared to be that the “soldiers,” or younger men, were distrustful of the process—based on the Dakota’s experience with the Treaty of 1837—which prevented the Dakota from reaching a consensus on signing the treaty. Wabasha rose to speak: “you have said, young men, that the chief who got up first to sign the treaty you would kill. It is this that has caused the difficulty.” One of them responded that they had not threatened the chiefs with death but they had heard the chiefs “were making a paper” and “they didn’t like it for the land belongs to the braves.” But now the younger men had agreed with the sale of the land, and Ramsey asked which of them would be the first to sign.

Medicine Bottle of Kap’oża asked that the signer be one who had not gone to Washington and had no part in the first treaty. He designated Ta Oyate Duta, who once again requested that the reservation be extended to Traverse des Sioux, where “wood was plenty, wild rice &c.” Lea responded that they had already extended the line and would extend it no farther. Ramsey added that the Dakota seemed to think the commissioners had come to cheat them: “We have marked out a large piece of land for your home. The soldiers asked for more. We gave it. It is all we can do.” Lea declaimed, “No man puts any food in his mouth by long talk but may often get hungry at it.” At this, Ta Oyate Duta, who knew how to write his own name, signed his Dakota name rather than the name Little Crow, by which he was known to whites, on “each of the duplicate copies of the treaty.” In all, sixty-four chiefs and warriors made their marks.¹²¹

To resolve the difficulty posed by the Dakota’s insistence that they be paid the balance due from the 1837 treaty’s education fund, the new treaty included a provision stating that “the entire annuity, provided for in the first section of the second article of the treaty of September twenty-ninth, eighteen hundred and thirty-seven (1837), including an unexpended balance that may be in the Treasury on the first of July, eighteen hundred and fifty-two (1852), shall thereafter be paid in money.” In the meantime arrangements were made to pay the past balance due. It is unclear whether the commissioners arrived with the intention of paying that amount. Historian William W. Folwell said “it was probably no accident that the American Fur Company had that amount of specie on hand.” The funds were advanced to the Indian agent, who paid out thirty thousand dollars to the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ and Waḣpekute on August 8, 1851. Each of the 2,585 men, women, and children received $10.50 plus 78/100 of a cent of the money.¹²²

The process for obtaining the Mendota treaty signers’ consent to pay alleged debts to the traders was slightly different from that at Traverse des Sioux. Waḣpekute band leaders signed a document on August 5 promising to pay varying amounts, including $42,000 to interpreter Alexander Faribault and $31,500 to Henry Sibley. No such document was signed by the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ leaders, so other means were found to induce them to hand over $90,000 of the treaty money to the traders.¹²³

In the months following the 1851 treaties, the primary repercussions related to the extra-legal documents designed to pay the traders. A trader named Madison Sweetser, who represented the interests of the firm of William G. and George W. Ewing, traders who did not benefit from these documents, attempted to create difficulties for the traders who did, hoping to change the situation.¹²⁴

At Sweetser’s encouragement, a group of Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leaders came to St. Paul in December 1851 to speak with their agent about the traders’ paper. They stated that the document had been obtained by fraud and deceit and that it was not explained to them at the signing. They had thought the document was part of the treaty. They were not against paying their debts but only those proven to be justly due. They presented a protest signed by fifteen of the Traverse des Sioux treaty signers. They also met with Governor Ramsey, who told them they could control the process of payment from the amount set aside by the treaty. The traders’ paper was not part of the treaty: it was a “matter entirely between themselves, over which the commissioners would exercise no control.” Sweetser, acting as agent for the protesting chiefs, forwarded the document to the Indian office, describing what had happened as a “stupendous fraud.”¹²⁵

Meanwhile, the treaties were making their way through the bureaucracy in Washington. The president submitted them to the Senate in February 1852. Southern Senators opposed measures that would facilitate eventual statehood for the region, but the treaties were finally ratified by a narrow margin in June. The treaty Ramsey negotiated with the Ojibwe in Pembina failed to be ratified.¹²⁶

Amendments to the Dakota treaties had been made by Congress, however. Among them was cancellation of the reservations along the Minnesota River, the home for the Dakota the treaty commissioners had spoken of in such glowing terms. Instead the president was authorized to select suitable land outside the ceded territory. The Dakota were to be paid ten cents an acre for the reservation land, with the value, approximately eight thousand dollars, to be added to the trust annuities. Later that summer an Indian appropriation bill was passed by Congress. It dictated that no payments would be made until the Dakota had assented to the treaty amendments and that the money would not be paid to any attorney or agent but directly to the Indians, “unless the imperious interest of the Indian or Indians, or some treaty stipulation, shall require the payment to be made otherwise, under the direction of the President.” This bland provision provided more cover for the scheme to intercept the money from the Dakota treaties. Alexander Ramsey was authorized to obtain the Dakota’s consent to these amendments, but he contracted with trader Henry M. Rice to do the job. Rice accomplished his mission, inducing Dakota leaders to sign a document authorizing Ramsey to receive the $275,000 set aside in the Traverse des Sioux treaty. In October a draft for over $593,000 was issued to Ramsey by the U.S. Treasury Department for payments to be made under the treaty.¹²⁷

Meanwhile Governor Ramsey, who was then in Washington, was shown the traders’ paper. He later claimed to have known nothing of it before, even while at Traverse des Sioux. Now on examining the document, it was later reported, he disingenuously “discovered that while not a power of attorney, it was a most solemn acknowledgement, made by the chiefs in open council, of their indebtedness to certain individuals, ‘pledging the faith of their tribe’ for payment, and requesting, in the words of the treaty, that the United States would pay the individuals named the sums acknowledged to be respectively due them.” At the same time Commissioner Lea advised Ramsey that the Dakota should be required to abide by such an agreement, “provided it was fairly and understandingly made.” Historian William W. Folwell wrote with irony that “Ramsey at no time contemplated any other procedure.” Ramsey had now concluded that the paper was an “irrevocable order to pay the persons named” and that, far from being a private matter between the traders and the Indians, it was an agreement that he as governor would enforce.¹²⁸

In this fashion, Ramsey and Lea provided the necessary mechanism to evade the legal sanction against payments to traders and other individuals and assured that the traders would get their money. Different means were employed to coerce the traders’ funds from the Mendota treaty—by individual payments to chiefs, by holding back on their annuity payments, and by detaining five young Dakota men in prison at Fort Snelling for killing some Ojibwe—until Dakota leaders were willing to sign receipts for money they did not receive. In November 1852 Ramsey went to Traverse des Sioux to pay the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ. Though he was armed with the authority of various documents already prepared for him, he sought to secure “cumulative evidence” of those treaty payments, that is, signed documents showing that the chiefs had received the money, even if the money was paid not to them but rather directly to the traders. Many of the chiefs were not cooperative, wanting the money to be paid to them in open council as the treaty provided. Ramsey stated that the document—the traders’ paper—signed at Traverse des Sioux was irrevocable and he was authorized to carry it out. But Sisituŋwaŋ Chief Red Iron, or Maza Ṡa, leader of a soldiers’ lodge, sought to organize opposition to Ramsey’s actions. Ramsey sent for a detachment from Fort Snelling to deal with the situation and then ordered the chief confined. As he had with the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ, he delayed payments for current annuities that were due the Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ, forcing eleven chiefs and soldiers to sign a receipt for $250,000 owed to traders and mixed-bloods, which Ramsey was to pay to the private parties listed in the traders’ paper. However, in many cases it appears that some of the money went not to those listed in the paper but to others who had facilitated this theft of the money from the treaty.¹²⁹

Even by the standards of the time, this convoluted series of steps that extracted Dakota money appropriated through governmental process—that is, payment due via the treaties—was tainted. A subsequent Senate investigation in the spring of 1853 revealed many irregularities, providing ample evidence of graft and corruption. Nonetheless, the Senate committee, acting in a political fashion to protect its compatriots, concluded that Ramsey’s conduct was not only blameless but “highly commendable and meritorious.” This decision was widely criticized by Ramsey’s political opponents. As for Sibley and his fellow traders, the obstacles to producing the desired result in the treaty process were almost too much to bear. Frederick Sibley, who worked in his brother’s business managing the “Sioux Outfit,” wrote in July 1853 to Hercules Dousman, “You truly said ‘the Sioux treaty will hang like a curse over our heads the balance of our lives.’” Perhaps even they recognized that the means they had used to achieve their ends went well beyond the casual corruption of the time.¹³⁰

1853

With ratification of the 1851 treaties, removal of Dakota bands to proposed reservations in the Upper Minnesota River valley begins. Settlement encroaches on ceded Dakota lands even before the land is surveyed by the government.

Meanwhile, the Dakota had neither their old land nor the new home that had been promised them. Ramsey appealed to Commissioner Lea and the president for permission to allow the Dakota to live in the reservation areas along the Minnesota River that were to be reserved temporarily, pending further action. This compromise was approved by President Franklin Pierce in 1854, though removal of the Dakota to the area had already begun in 1853.

1858

Minnesota becomes a state. Former trader Henry Hastings Sibley is elected the first governor. In June a treaty signed with the Dakota at Washington, DC, cedes one-half of Dakota reservation land on the north shore of the Minnesota River to the United States. The treaty is not ratified until 1860.

Two treaties in 1858, concluded in Washington, DC, altered the terms of the 1851 treaties by adding the northern shore of the Minnesota River to the lands “ceded” to the United States under the 1851 treaty. This change confined the Dakota people to the southern shore of the Minnesota River. The treaties of 1858 signed by the same groups of Dakota were further clarified by a Senate resolution in 1860 to settle the titles to land of both Dakota and non-Dakota people under the 1858 treaties.¹³¹

These later modifications of the 1851 treaties effectively removed the Dakota people from all of their ancient homelands in Minnesota except for the narrow ten-mile strip running for 140 miles along the Minnesota River’s south shore. Confined to this small area, the Dakota could not possibly maintain their lives according to the hunting and gathering practices they engaged in for centuries before the Europeans’ arrival. This dependence was recognized in the 1851 treaties by the obligation of the United States to provide the Dakota people the wherewithal each year to purchase goods to sustain themselves in what proved to be a meager existence at best.

Wambdi Taŋka or Big Eagle, a Dakota leader originally from Black Dog village, whose grandfather of the same name was painted by the artist George Catlin in 1835, was photographed by A. Zeno Schindler in Washington, DC, at the time of the Treaty of 1858 negotiations.

1862

A war between the Dakota and the United States begins in August. On September 9, 1862, Governor Ramsey responds to public discontent and calls for the expulsion and extermination of all Dakota.

The long-term effects of these federal actions became apparent in summer of 1862, when the shipment of annuities due under previous treaties was delayed. Desperation among the Dakota deepened and in August war broke out in the Minnesota River valley between some of the Dakota and the United States. In less than two months, after much loss of life on all sides, the Dakota were overwhelmed and defeated by the superior forces of the United States. A violent backlash broke out as settlers, new to the region and terrified by the war, demanded that the Dakota be expelled. Governor Ramsey stated in a public message in September 1862 that the “Sioux Indians of Minnesota” must be “exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State.”¹³²

Sisituŋwaŋ and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ chiefs gathered in Washington, DC, for a photograph in the studio of Charles DeForest Fredericks in 1858, at the time of the negotiation of their last treaty with the U.S. government. Among them was the Sisituŋwaŋ leader Maza Ṡa or Red Iron, in the center at back, and Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leaders Mazamani, seated at far left, and Upi Iyahdeya, seated at far right.

The furious response was further manifested in bounties offered for Dakota scalps and the fevered pitch of retribution demanded by Minnesota’s white citizens. In September, approximately two thousand Dakota people gathered at the Upper Camp near present-day Montevideo to wait for Sibley’s arrival. They “surrendered” fully expecting to be treated humanely as prisoners of war, based on Sibley’s promise that they would “be protected by me when I arrive.” Once there on September 26, he renamed the area “Camp Release.” The men were separated from the women and children and tried for their crimes; 303 were condemned to die in Mankato. The remaining seventeen hundred women, children, and elderly, including hundreds of noncombatants, some of whom had protected white settler refugees from the war, were rounded up and force-marched to a concentration camp beneath the bluffs of Fort Snelling, where they were held over the winter of 1862. Several hundred died, and in the spring of 1863 the survivors were sent by steamboat down the Mississippi River and up the Missouri, beyond the borders of their Minnesota homeland. In addition two military columns were organized and rode out to the west under the command of Sibley and General Alfred Sully in a pincer movement to expel the remaining Dakota from the state. They massacred more than three hundred noncombatant Dakota at Whitestone Hill just northwest of Lake Traverse in September 1863.¹³³

The Minnesota backlash reached all the way to Washington, DC, where Congress in February and March 1863 passed two statutes, one for the “relief” of settlers harmed by the war and another for the removal of the Dakota. The Relief Act, sometimes called the “Abrogation Act,” purported to abrogate all treaties with the Dakota and directed that payments due from the United States to the Dakota would instead be made into a fund to provide relief for settlers harmed by the war. This unilateral action by the United States was not the subject of negotiation in any treaty signed by the Dakota. Even if the war is considered to be a breach of the treaties by some of the Dakota, the treaties contain no language that specifies what the legal remedy might be for such a breach. Instead the United States unilaterally not only decided that its obligations to provide payments to the Dakota under the terms of treaties were no longer in effect but went on to seize the lands of the Dakota. However, it should also be noted that although the act abrogated U.S. obligations toward the Dakota, it gave contradictory evidence of some continuing support, providing sustenance for the Dakota and setting aside other lands for them at an unspecified site beyond Minnesota’s borders.¹³⁴

1863

Treaties with the Dakota are abrogated by Congress. In April and May, the remaining condemned men and the survivors of the Fort Snelling concentration camp are forcibly removed from Minnesota.

These provisions raise more questions than they answer about the long-held treaty rights of the Dakota people and the federal government’s relationship toward them, questions which have yet to be settled by courts of law. When considered in the larger arc of time from 1805 to 1863, the Abrogation Act is an important moment in the long-running clash of master stories that we have seen occurring at the treaty table. And this makes clear that the story of the Dakota, their relationship to the land, and the meaning of the treaties they signed did not end in 1863.

As shown here, government officials and those who worked with them sought to manipulate the treaty processes for their own ends. Regardless of “good intentions” stated by officials who claimed they wanted to preserve a place for the Dakota in their ancient homelands, the Dakota were always at a disadvantage, manipulated by individuals and by the process itself. They did not understand European concepts of land, the very process of treaty making, and the extent of the corruption of officials involved. They often assumed the best of the officials with whom they dealt. As a result they were banished from their homelands at the moment of their last treaty. What happened in 1862 and 1863 was simply the aftermath of actions taken in the treaties that came before.