Читать книгу Henry Sibley and the U. S.-Dakota War of 1862 - Rhoda R. Gilman - Страница 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.

Sibley was assigned to trade with the Dakota people. As early as 1805, the Dakota agreed to let the United States build a fort at the mouth of the Minnesota River, and in the 1820s they watched the fort be built and garrisoned with white troops. Except for the military reservation around it, no Dakota land had yet been taken, but in 1837 the tribe’s two eastern bands—Mdewakanton and Wahpekute—signed a treaty that gave up their claims to everything east of the Mississippi River. But that was not enough for white settlers. Soon, white settlers on farms and in small towns on the river’s east side began to look longingly at Indian land on the western bank.

The years between 1840 and 1842 were a pivotal time in the life of Henry Sibley. He was an avid hunter who loved adventuring on the unspoiled prairies of western Minnesota and northern Iowa. In the fall and winter of 1840–41 he lived for several months with a Dakota band engaged in its winter hunt, and a few months later he became the father of a Dakota daughter. The year 1841 also saw the signing of a treaty that held out the flickering hope of a dramatically different future for the upper Mississippi region. Known as the Doty treaty, it would have turned the Dakota country from the Mississippi west to the James River into an all-Indian territory from which white settlers were excluded. Not only the Dakota but other Indian tribes would have been given permanent homes there, and eventually it would have become an Indian-governed state.

Sibley was enthusiastic about the plan, writing that no other treaty had been “better calculated for securing the interests of the Indians and of the people in the country.” Apparently the Dakota thought so too, for they signed it immediately. The treaty was doomed, however, in the U.S. Senate. Although Sibley himself spent nearly four months lobbying in Washington, it was overwhelmingly defeated. Clearly, no barrier would ever be raised to protect Indian possession of the land. Twelve days later the American Fur Company closed.

Sibley and his partner, Hercules Dousman of Prairie du Chien, continued in the fur trade for a few more years, supplied by the Chouteau Company of St. Louis, but both men could see that it was a losing business. The future lay with white settlement and development of the country, so they began to invest in land, lumber, and steamboats. Sibley turned to politics, but his lobbying was more successful in creating a new Minnesota Territory than it had been in ratifying the Doty treaty. The payoff was his election as delegate to Congress.

During his four years in Congress, from 1849 to 1853, Sibley felt conflicted. Like most Americans of his generation, he was intensely patriotic. He accepted conquest of the west as divinely ordained and his duty to the United States as a sacred obligation. Nevertheless, his own human sympathy, his awareness of government duplicity, and his love for the land and its vanishing past left him with a divided heart and a troubled conscience.

In the summer of 1850 he delivered a blistering speech to Congress on the subject of its corrupt and ruthless Indian policy. That policy, he said, had consistently led to extermination of Indian people. He predicted that history would in time “do justice to the heroic bands who have struggled so fiercely to preserve their lands and the graves of their fathers from the grasping hand of the white man.” In closing, he told the congressmen that the remaining tribes were being encircled “as with a wall of fire,” and unless there was a change, the country “must very soon suffer the consequences of a bloody and remorseless Indian war.”

Even as he spoke, Sibley faced a bitter dilemma: his success depended on the very system he deplored. Among the voters of Minnesota Territory, popular demand for opening up the land across the river had become deafening. Meanwhile, Sibley himself had lost money in the fur trade, and he owed more to Chouteau and the bankrupt American Fur Company than he could ever recover—unless the Dakota paid their debts to him from treaty money. Congress frowned on spelling out that kind of payment in a treaty, but there were ways to achieve it. Both Sibley’s political career and his personal solvency were at stake.

Without doubt, there had to be a treaty, and Sibley was the key man to set it up. In doing so, he navigated a complex network of power relationships, for both sides were divided, with different factions demanding different things. Standing behind Sibley, both pushing and supporting him, was Alexander Ramsey, the territory’s tough young governor. Short of Congress, Ramsey held final government authority over Indian affairs in Minnesota, and his political future was on the line no less than Sibley’s. A more uncertain element was Henry M. Rice, a onetime business associate of Sibley and also his rival for leadership of Minnesota Democrats. Altogether, the land-grab took more than three years and resulted in two similar treaties.

Negotiating separately with the upper and lower bands of Dakota was part of Sibley’s strategy. The two upper (western) bands—Sisseton and Wahpeton—had endured several hard years, and many of them were near starvation. They looked to treaty payments for survival. The lower (eastern) bands were still receiving payments from the treaty of 1837 and were far less persuadable. Once the western bands had sold their land, however, the eastern bands would be surrounded by white settlers and under great pressure to do the same.

Another division among the Dakota that worked to Sibley’s advantage was the large population of mixed-blood people. They could not legally participate in treaties, but they had great influence with their relatives who did. Many of them had been engaged in the fur trade, and some powerful families, like the Faribaults, the Renvilles, the Provencalles, and the Laframboise, had been employed by Sibley and hoped to benefit from treaty money. Even white traders like Joseph R. Brown, who was Sibley’s closest business and political friend, had married into the tribe and were therefore trusted by its members. Sibley himself acknowledged and supported his Dakota daughter, Helen, but he had married Sarah Jane Steele, a sister of the Fort Snelling sutler, and was raising a white family.

Yet a third division had been created by the work of Christian missionaries like Stephen R. Riggs, Dr. Thomas S. Williamson, and the Pond brothers. While not many Dakota had converted, a number had been influenced by the teachings toward abandoning their traditional way of life and taking up farming along with other European customs. They were bitterly scorned by those who clung to ancestral Dakota ways, but most of them, like the missionaries, argued in favor of a treaty.

On the white side there were also divisions. The fat pot of potential treaty money drew traders from all around the Midwest to try getting their hands into it. Most powerful were the Ewing brothers of Indiana and Ohio, who had close connections in Washington and had financed one or two small independent traders who competed with Sibley. From the initial appointment of treaty commissioners to the final investigation of the payment two years later, the Ewings schemed and raised barriers to get a share of the money.

Even more of a threat was the growing division in the U.S. Senate between free and slave states. A treaty that opened the rich prairies of southern Minnesota to northern farmers and new immigrants would soon lead to another free state knocking at the door of the nation. Southern senators could see that. Unable to defeat the treaty outright, they tried to amend it to death, and they nearly succeeded.

The first and most colorful chapter in the story was played out at Traverse des Sioux in the summer of 1851. There, the two upper bands signed away their land except for a narrow reservation along the upper Minnesota River. They also signed a separate “traders paper” that gave a cash sum of some $210,000 to traders and mixed-blood relatives. At Mendota a few days later, a parallel treaty was signed with the lower bands, whose reservation would be along the river just below that of the upper bands. As expected, there was more opposition among the Mdewakanton, but the tipping point came when Chief Little Crow (Taoyateduta) defied the restless young men of the band to shoot him as he strode up to the table and signed the paper.

The drama then moved to Washington, where senators voted a number of amendments. The most important eliminated the reservations, leaving the Dakota to go wherever the president chose to put them. It led Chief Wabasha to declare, “There is one thing more which our great father can do, that is, gather us all together on the prairie and surround us with soldiers and shoot us down.” Nevertheless the Dakota signed the rewritten treaty. Ramsey promised them that the president would let them live on the reservation already agreed on, and the upper bands gave Ramsey their power of attorney, thinking, apparently, that this revoked the traders paper they had signed. Ramsey thought otherwise, and since payment of the money was in his hands, he controlled the situation.

Back in Washington, the Ewings claimed that there had been fraud in cheating them out of money the upper bands had agreed to pay them. Sibley immediately demanded an investigation of the charge. Although the final report judged that the treaty had not been scrupulously followed, it cleared Ramsey of malfeasance, and the Ewings withdrew their claim. So southern Minnesota was taken from the Dakota in a cloud of deceit and broken promises, leading Dousman to observe, “The Sioux treaty will hang like a curse over our heads the balance of our lives.” He was right.

As white men carved up the land and jockeyed for possession of its riches, the Dakota slowly made their way toward the area designated for them along the Minnesota River. Although the tribe still had no assurance that they could occupy the reservation permanently, Governor Willis A. Gorman, who had replaced Ramsey in 1853, directed them to move, and the new occupants of their previous homes added other forms of persuasion. At Red Wing, the Dakota village mysteriously burned while the band was absent on a hunt. Sibley tried to intervene on behalf of the small Wahpekute band, telling Gorman that some of them wanted to live beside the Cannon River and adopt the ways of white men, but he was unsuccessful.

The payments to traders and mixed-bloods listed in the traders papers had been taken from a cash “subsistence fund” included in the treaty that was intended to pay expenses of resettling the Dakota in their new homes. But that fund was depleted, and the Dakota were in urgent need of their first annuities, due in July 1853. Not until November, after they were assembled at the reservation, was a partial payment made. Since none of the housing, roads, or other improvements promised by the treaty had appeared, the bands scattered again to their old localities for a winter of hunting and meager subsistence.

This scene continued through most of the 1850s. Improvements lagged, Congress failed to appropriate money to meet treaty payments in full, and delivery of supplies was inadequate and nearly always late. Thus the Dakota had little choice but to seek game and other food where they could find it. Nevertheless, as the country became dotted with farms, settlers were often indignant about the presence of Indian hunters far from their reservation.

When asked by an eastern editor about the fate of the Indians, Sibley wrote in 1856, “Turn to the history of the Six Nations and of the other bands whose graves are numberless on both sides of the Alleghanies and you will need but little aid from the imagination.” It was, he said, the old story of broken treaties and betrayed promises, and the Dakota “can look for no redress of their grievances on this side of the ‘spirit land.’”

Meanwhile, Sibley’s business interests had turned to townsite promotion and railroads in the booming market of the 1850s. Although his trade in furs had long since ended, he continued to serve as agent for the Chouteau Company in its Minnesota land investments. He declined to run again for Congress, but he maintained his leadership in what was becoming the independent antislavery wing of Minnesota’s Democratic Party. His longtime rival Henry Rice continued in close alliance with the pro-southern administration of President James Buchanan. With ever-growing tension in the country over slavery and the approach of statehood in 1857, Sibley chaired the Democratic twin of Minnesota’s two constitutional conventions. That fall he was elected to be the state’s first governor in anticipation of immediate admission to the union.

The same year saw several changes for the Dakota. In the spring of 1857, the settlements in southwestern Minnesota were terrorized by a small band of outlaw Wahpekute who had separated years before from the main tribe. After the outlaw Wahpekute killed isolated farmers near Spirit Lake and along the upper Des Moines River, the government spent months in futile pursuit, making unwarranted threats to the rest of the tribe. These efforts only demonstrated the inability of the U.S. Army and the Indian Department to cope with the situation.

Later that summer, Charles E. Flandreau, the government agent for the Dakota, was appointed to the territorial Supreme Court and soon after that was elected chief justice of the new state. Sibley’s old friend Joseph R. Brown fell heir to the coveted political appointment as federal Indian agent. Brown’s tenure, along with a renewed missionary effort, brought rapid change. His wife, Susan Frenier Brown, was a Sisseton mixed-blood. He knew the Dakota, and he knew how to work the system at the Indian Office. Despite his history as a trader, speculator, and notorious whiskey seller, Brown accepted the policy laid out by the missionaries and implemented it effectively. Homes were built, fields were plowed, and the Upper and Lower Sioux Agencies, which served the two divisions of the tribe, began to take on the look of small villages, with government warehouses, blacksmith shops, mills, and schools.

This very progress, however, polarized the Dakota. Led by the older chiefs, Wabasha and Wacouta, a large part of the tribe recognized the inevitable need for adapting, and now that they had the chance, they moved quickly to do so. Traditionalists, along with many of the younger men who saw change threatening their honored status as hunters and warriors, fiercely opposed the Indian farmers who adopted European clothing, schooling, and in some cases Christianity. Traditional attitudes were reinforced by frequent contact with Yankton and Yanktonais tribesmen, who still lived as free buffalo hunters in the Missouri River valley. Soon the young men began to form soldiers lodges. Although these were based on a temporary form of policing organization that had customarily been adopted for hunting and warfare, they took on a new and more permanent cast as a secret network of militants pledged to upholding the tribe’s ancient rituals and social customs.

Early in 1858, Brown and the Indian Office also acted to clarify the uncertain legal status of the reservation. A group of chiefs and headmen taken to Washington signed a treaty in June that year. By that treaty, the Dakota gave up the half of their reservation that lay north of the Minnesota River and agreed to allotment of individual, privately owned farms from the remaining land. As the pressure against ancient communal customs and group identities thus increased, so did tension within the tribe. Hostility toward farmer Indians escalated into harassment, destruction of property, and frequent threats of violence. Some of the anger in the soldiers lodges also spilled over onto the barns and livestock of settlers who were hurriedly staking claims to the ceded lands just north of the river.

Statehood for Minnesota was delayed by eight months because of the standoff between slave and free states, so when Sibley finally took office in the spring of 1858 he had only a year and a half to serve. He had been elected by a paper-thin margin and could see that the tide of the new Republican Party was rising, so he declined to run for a second term. In 1859, Republicans swept the state, electing Ramsey as governor and assuring that in the presidential race of 1860, Lincoln would take Minnesota. As the southern states seceded and war began in 1861, Sibley, unlike many other leading Minnesotans, did not seek a prestigious military appointment. Instead, at age fifty, he looked forward to a quiet retirement with his family at Mendota. Already, a year earlier, he had briefly become a grandfather, when his Dakota daughter, Helen, who had married a young Wisconsin doctor and moved to Milwaukee, bore her first child. Within days after the birth, both Helen and the baby died.

As yet there was no civil service system, so a change in party control meant a wholesale turnover in federal jobs. The Republican takeover after eight years of Democratic rule in Washington had an immediate effect on Minnesota’s Indian affairs. Already notorious for corruption, the Indian Office was well known as a place to make an easy fortune. Thus Democrats were summarily turned out and Republicans named, regardless of experience or competence. Early in 1861, the Dakota saw Brown replaced as their agent by Thomas J. Galbraith, a stubborn man with a drinking habit and contempt for Indians. The results turned a tense situation into a disaster.

When Galbraith arrived at the Lower Agency in May to take up his new duties, he found boiling resentment over the treaty signed in 1858. Two years had passed before it was ratified. During that time, settlers crowded into what had been reservation land across the Minnesota River, partly cutting off Dakota access to former hunting grounds to the north and east. Assured that they would receive a fair price, the Dakota had left the exact sum to be named by the Senate. A fair price, according to Agent Brown was $5.00 per acre; the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs recommended $1.25; the Senate as a whole fixed on thirty cents. Expecting an adequate sum, the Dakota had agreed to pay their debts to the traders then doing business on the reservation. During the two-year delay, those debts continued to climb, and by the time the meager treaty money arrived in 1861, the lower bands found that all of it was paid directly to the traders.

Meanwhile the rift within the tribe continued to widen, and Galbraith’s policies hastened the process. He openly favored the farmers, both with annuity money and in other ways. In both the upper and lower bands, anger mounted among young members of the soldiers lodges. Continuing to meet in secret, they dominated and intimidated others and helped to stimulate a revival of traditional spiritual practices in opposition to the missionaries. Among the upper bands, many farmers left their fields in fear for their lives, and troops were needed to keep the peace at the annuity payment in 1861. A poor corn crop that year was followed by a severe winter and a spring of grim hunger.

Rumors circulated that the embattled U.S. government would be unable to make its promised payments. Some supplies arrived that spring when navigation opened in 1862, and government warehouses at the two agencies were partly stocked. The cash annuities, however, were delayed, week after week. Traders had supplies on hand, but they refused to extend more credit, fearful that Indian anger would prevent their payment from the annuity money. As tension mounted, Galbraith summoned troops and waited. At last, early in August, an armed confrontation with some 500 Sisseton and Wahpeton forced him to open the warehouse at the Upper Agency. Their demands for food met, the Dakota dispersed, and the troops headed back to Fort Ripley.

Among the lower bands, there was less hunger and open hostility but no less anger. The young zealots of the soldiers lodge shared with each other their fury and frustration, but leadership was lacking—and so were voices of moderation. The erosion of traditional roles and social institutions under reservation conditions weakened the influence of even the most respected chiefs. Several of them had joined the farmers, and others remained silent. The women of the tribe, who in a strong communal society could speak with a unified voice, were also silenced by separation onto family farmsteads and division caused by missionary teachings.

The ground was shifting elsewhere, too. The Great White Father no longer commanded monolithic authority. News of defeat and stalemate on southern battlefields circulated among the bands, carried by literate mixed-bloods and government employees. In fact, Galbraith himself had been busy recruiting volunteers from among the many mixed-blood men on the reservation for a corps of scouts and sharpshooters to aid the Union Army. On August 16 he left the Lower Agency, headed for Fort Snelling with his small force of “Renville Rangers.”

The next day four young Mdewakanton men returning from a hunting expedition north of the Minnesota River began to dispute their relative bravery and daring. The stakes escalated until at last, in a show of bravado, they shot four white settlers. Fleeing to their village, which was a stronghold of the soldiers lodge, they begged for protection. Intense discussions followed, centering on the undoubted fact that the entire band would be punished for the crime. Others were called in, and there was a rising wave of sentiment in favor of immediate war. At last, in the middle of the night, they decided to appeal to Little Crow.

Taoyateduta, who had defied threats of death to sign the treaty of Mendota, had also been a leader in negotiating the 1858 treaty. His readiness to deal with the government despite its repeated betrayal of solemn agreements had damaged his prestige with the tribe. Nevertheless, he was the one leader who retained credibility with both groups among the divided Mdewakanton. Although he spoke some English, lived in a government-built house, and was willing to wear European clothing on occasion, he clung strongly to Dakota religious beliefs and resisted becoming a farmer. His ambivalence was symbolized by a tall tipi standing beside the brick house in which his family lived.

It was in this tipi that an agonizing confrontation took place in the predawn hours of August 18, 1862. After listening to the story of the young men and the harangues of their supporters, Little Crow blackened his face as if in mourning and covered his head. At last someone hurled an accusation of cowardice. Springing to his feet, the chief retorted with a powerful recital of the utter hopelessness of war against the whites. Then he concluded, “Braves, you are little children—you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in January.—Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.”