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HENRY SIBLEY AND THE U.S.–DAKOTA WAR OF 1862. Rhoda R. Gilman. An MHS Express e-short, excerpted and adapted from Henry Hastings Sibley: Divided Heart by Rhoda R. Gilman
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Setting
Henry Hastings Sibley came to Minnesota in 1834. Born of New England ancestry in the frontier fur trade mecca of Detroit, he was twenty-three years old and a rising star in the American Fur Company. By that time, however, the North American fur trade was in its final years. The tide of European migration had already swept across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Mississippi Valley. Land, not trade, was the prize that drew the endless army of settlers and sodbusters. They saw themselves not as conquerors but as a legion bringing civilization and the light of true religion to a wilderness and its “savage” inhabitants.
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As white men carved up the land and jockeyed for possession of its riches, the Dakota slowly made their way toward the area designated for them along the Minnesota River. Although the tribe still had no assurance that they could occupy the reservation permanently, Governor Willis A. Gorman, who had replaced Ramsey in 1853, directed them to move, and the new occupants of their previous homes added other forms of persuasion. At Red Wing, the Dakota village mysteriously burned while the band was absent on a hunt. Sibley tried to intervene on behalf of the small Wahpekute band, telling Gorman that some of them wanted to live beside the Cannon River and adopt the ways of white men, but he was unsuccessful.
The payments to traders and mixed-bloods listed in the traders papers had been taken from a cash “subsistence fund” included in the treaty that was intended to pay expenses of resettling the Dakota in their new homes. But that fund was depleted, and the Dakota were in urgent need of their first annuities, due in July 1853. Not until November, after they were assembled at the reservation, was a partial payment made. Since none of the housing, roads, or other improvements promised by the treaty had appeared, the bands scattered again to their old localities for a winter of hunting and meager subsistence.
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