5
Encounters with the Sioux

Long obtained his second assignment in the West the following year. Reporting to General Thomas Smith at Fort Belle Fontaine, near St. Louis, in May, he received his new orders. He was to make a military and topographical reconnaissance of the upper Mississippi, essentially completing the work he had begun in 1816. On his way up the Mississippi River he would inspect frontier defenses: Forts Edwards, Madison, Armstrong, and Crawford, the last of these being situated at Prairie du Chien at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. From Prairie du Chien, he was to make a side trip up the Wisconsin River to survey the portage between that river and the Fox River flowing into Green Bay on Lake Michigan and to recommend a site for a fort there. This was the main route used by the French and British for supplying the fur trade west of the Great Lakes. After returning to Prairie du Chien, he was to proceed north to St. Anthony Falls, the farthest point of navigation on the Mississippi, investigating possible sites for more forts in that direction. Long’s reconnaissance of the upper Mississippi served the national aim of establishing a cordon of forts between the Northwest Indian tribes and the British. A subsidiary purpose was to meet with the Sioux Indians inhabiting the upper Mississippi and learn if they were peaceably disposed to the United States. For Long, the final leg of this expedition from Prairie du Chien to St. Anthony Falls was exactly the kind of exploration he was itching to do. What little was known about the area came from the published accounts of two previous explorers, the celebrated eighteenth-century fur trader and traveler, Jonathan Carver, and the late Captain Zebulon M. Pike.¹

Governor of Missouri William Clark, the veteran explorer of the Lewis and Clark expedition, presented Long with a six-oared skiff for the voyage, while General Smith assigned him six enlisted men, a corporal, and an interpreter. It was a larger command than on his previous expedition through the Illinois country. In addition to this eight-man crew, the boat carried provisions, cooking utensils, a single camp tent, and supplies of whiskey, tobacco, and other items for making presents to the Indians. The expedition set sail from Fort Belle Fontaine on the first of June. Six weeks later it arrived at Prairie du Chien, where it took on board fresh supplies and one additional soldier for exploration of the upper Mississippi.²

Prairie du Chien was not only the jumping-off point for Long’s first major exploration, it was the center of the fur trade in Wisconsin in 1817. With a population that was predominantly French-speaking, substantially mixed-blood, and salted with a few British traders, it was typical of the Anglo-French-Indian milieu that persisted throughout most of the Old Northwest even after the War of 1812. Governor Clark had led a military expedition to this old French settlement in May 1814, establishing Fort Shelby as a defense against a British invasion from Canada, but the British had captured the fort just two months later and held it until the end of the war, blowing it up when they withdrew. Even with the return of peace, American traders were hardly welcome there. A report reached Washington after the war ended of Americans’ scalps being bought and sold in the village of Prairie du Chien and strung on poles as a warning to American traders not to come into the area. In July 1816, General Smith arrived with a force of soldiers and built Fort Crawford on the site of the previous fort. When Long arrived in July 1817, the US Office of Indian Trade had recently established a government factory nearby under the supervision of John W. Johnson. This government trader informed Long that the Indians who lived on the Mississippi above Prairie du Chien would probably give him no trouble. But hostility toward Americans on the part of the village occupants and their Indian trading partners was still palpable; Johnson himself, despite being married to an Indian, said he could not wait to get away from “the cursed stinking Indians.”³

Long’s impression of this frontier settlement was no more favorable than Johnson’s. Prairie du Chien was named for an elongated plain lying between the Mississippi River and a line of bluffs. The prairie was beautiful to behold, but as portions of it were swampy and periodically inundated by the river, he found the whole place pestilential. Fort Crawford was situated on an island where the river braided into many channels, and in times of low water—as when Long visited there in July—the fort was surrounded by stagnant pools. The settlement of Prairie du Chien, located on the mainland, was only marginally better off than the fort, as much of the surrounding plain was infiltrated by sloughs and marshes. A single village street, lined with stores, workshops, and stables, ran parallel to the river for about a half mile, while dwellings were scattered more widely about. Zebulon Pike had estimated the village population at around 500 or 600 people in 1805, but it appeared to Long to be much less; he counted a total of thirty-eight occupied family dwellings. About one mile in back of the settlement was the grand farm, which was enclosed against wandering livestock and cultivated by the inhabitants in common. Long, with a New Englander’s eye for how to lay out a farm, thought the existing crops of corn, wheat, and potatoes showed a decided lack of initiative by the inhabitants. “They have never yet taken pains to seed the ground with any kind of grain except the summer wheat, which is never so productive as the fall or winter wheat.” With proper care, he commented, the farm could yield much larger and more varied crops.⁴

Long took a disparaging view of the people of Prairie du Chien. Noting that most of them had “savage blood in their veins,” he gave voice to a common perception of his era in which all of humanity existed on a continuum from savage to civilized. He thought the community was not only dwindling in size, it was also slipping backwards into a state of savagery after the disruption of peaceful trade for a number of years during the War of 1812. “If we compare the village and its inhabitants in their present state with what they were when Pike visited this part of the country, we shall find that instead of improving they have been degenerating,” he wrote. “Their improvement has been checked by a diversion of the Indian trade into other channels and their degeneracy accelerated not only by a consequent impoverishment of the inhabitants, but in addition to natural decay, their unconquerable slothfulness and want of enterprise.”⁵ The idea of human degeneracy ran like a motif through American thought in Long’s day, so the explorer was hardly alone in perceiving a community’s economic decline in social and moral terms. In Long’s mind, Prairie du Chien’s degeneracy provided a window into the savage state of Indian peoples.

As Prairie du Chien stood on the border of Sioux territory, Long replaced his first interpreter with a second, a mixed race named Roque, who spoke the Sioux language. But as he found it difficult to communicate with Roque in French he took aboard yet another interpreter, a New Englander by the name of Hempstead, who had resided in Prairie du Chien for eight years and spoke fluent French. Thus, to communicate with the Sioux his speech would be translated from English into French and from French into Sioux. He also permitted two young Americans to join the party when they paddled up suddenly in their birchbark canoe. Grandsons of Jonathan Carver, with the names King and Gun, they had journeyed from New York to claim a tract of land that their grandfather had purchased from the Indians more than fifty years earlier.⁶

On the first day of the journey the expedition passed a village of the Winnebagos, deserted since 1814, and saw not a single Indian. On the second day, about forty miles above Prairie du Chien, the expedition passed a cluster of Sioux lodges on the left bank of the river. When the Sioux saw the skiff with its American flag, they hoisted an American flag in greeting. Long returned the greeting by discharging a blunderbuss, whereupon the Sioux fired two guns over the water ahead of the skiff. Since the skiff was under sail and making swift progress upstream, Long decided not to put ashore, but when six young men of the Sioux village jumped in a canoe he slackened sail so that their canoe could overtake them. As the canoe came alongside the skiff, he took the hand of the head man, exchanged a few words, and gave him some tobacco and a pint of whiskey, after which the Indians shoved off. ⁷

The next day, the expedition came to a larger Sioux village, where a similar ritual greeting unfolded. This time Long put ashore. The Indians gathered around the boat landing, seating themselves on the ground in a manner that suggested they expected a speech. Talking through his two interpreters, Long inquired if their chief was at home and learned that he was not. He then stated that he would like to talk with their chief and hoped to see him on their return trip. He further stated that he had been sent by the Great Father, the new president, who wanted to learn more about his red children. After this brief speech the Indians showed their friendly disposition by inviting Long and the interpreters to go through their village. It was evident that the Indians had just broken off a ceremony. They described for him what they called a bear dance, which was occasioned when a young male had a powerful dream that signaled his coming into manhood. Long pumped them for more information, and although the leaders would not identify the young man at the center of the ceremony they did give the explorer considerable details, which he carefully recorded. Long’s description of the bear dance ceremony, running to several pages in his journal, constituted his first effort at ethnography. It showed him to be an inquisitive and careful observer of native culture even though he assumed that it was inferior to his own.⁸

Long had few other encounters with the Sioux on this voyage. He made a brief stop at another village and passed still another that was deserted, the occupants being away hunting. The expedition reached St. Anthony Falls (the site of modern-day Minneapolis) after seven days of rowing from Prairie du Chien, camped one night on the shore just below the cataract, and then turned back. A few miles below the falls, Long inspected the bluff where the St. Peter’s River (now named the Minnesota) flows into the Mississippi, and found it to be an admirable location for a fort. He determined that the St. Peter’s was 200 yards wide at the mouth and navigable for Mackinaw boats, but he did not venture upstream to the three Sioux villages that he thought he would find about nine miles above. Going back down the Mississippi, he stopped at one more Sioux village at a wide section of the river known as Lake Pepin, but he spent only “a very few minutes” with the Indians there so as to take advantage of a strong wind blowing the skiff down that long stretch of slack water.⁹

Long’s haste and cursory Indian diplomacy were necessitated by a shortage of supplies. Running out of food, Long had to stop early each day so the men could catch fish for their dinner. Long blamed the shortage of provisions on his corporal, to whom he had entrusted the task of issuing rations. When the corporal disclosed the shortage, he admitted to having no prior experience in managing an expedition’s supplies. More troubling than the dwindling food supply, however, was the fact that the expedition ran out of whiskey soon after turning about at St. Anthony Falls, which meant that the commander had little to offer Indians by way of gifts. To shorten the return trip—and, perhaps also, to avoid Indians—Long ordered the expedition to run portions of the river at night, floating with the current and steering by the light of a fire, which burned on a raft towed behind the skiff. Even this arrangement presented problems, as the leading craft occasionally ran aground on the many sandbars. Notwithstanding those hazards and privations on the return, however, Long returned to Fort Belle Fontaine on August 15 with all men in good health. The expedition covered nearly 1,400 river miles in just seventy-five days, making an average distance of 18 miles per day, an excellent pace. With this journey Long proved his ability to lead men safely over great distances at relatively low cost to the government.¹⁰