LITMIR.BIZ

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on the ice of the frozen Mississippi River.⁵³

      The construction and garrisoning of Fort Snelling in 1820 had been intended to bolster a tenuous American presence in the region. The young republic had done its utmost to assert sovereignty over the Great Lakes region in the War of 1812, but in the remote northern interior of the land that would become Minnesota, the Union Jack continued to wave over the trading posts of the well-established North West Company. While the owners and managers of the company were mostly Scotsmen, their employees who were actively engaged in the fur trade were French-Canadians and men of mixed French and indigenous ancestry. Almost all of them were connected by ties of kinship to the natives who trapped and hunted for furs and traded with the company for guns and ammunition, woolen blankets, iron pots, and other manufactured goods. President Monroe’s 1817 ban on non-Americans trading on U.S. soil was toothless without a military presence to enforce it. Fort Snelling’s purpose had thus been to counteract the still-powerful British influence in the region and to control access to the fur trade interior by regulating the Mississippi route.⁵⁴

      When David Hunter arrived at Fort Snelling in 1823, there was hardly a white person in the region who was not related to the Dakotas or Ojibwes—or sometimes both—either through birth or through marriage. By the 1830s, six generations of intermarriage “had produced an intricate web of relationships, with people of mixed ancestry acting as an essential bridge between their white and Indian kin.”⁵⁵ On the Upper Mississippi such intimate and material relationships mattered more than national allegiances. French remained the lingua franca of the region; English was hardly spoken. Like that of the French and British empires before it, the military power that the Americans were able to project in the region was feeble, insufficient to enforce a sovereignty whose assertion on maps was belied by a more complicated reality on the ground. Garrisoned with a few hundred troops, American might was no match for a population of tens of thousands of Indians. Largely though, it was the monopolistic fur trade—not the army—that both kept the peace and provoked conflict.⁵⁶

      Well into the middle of the nineteenth century, Minnesota remained aloof from the general east-to-west pressure of white settler expansion to secure Indian “removal.” White settlement was in fact antithetical to the interests of the fur trade companies. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the fur-trading monopolies, especially the North West Company, that had proved hostile—more than the region’s native inhabitants—to the few pockets of intrepid (and usually uninformed) white settlers who attempted to establish agricultural colonies in the remote and inhospitable river valleys of the North Country.⁵⁷

      At mid-century, even as the new states hewn out of the Northwest Territory to the east and south sought to remove Indians from within their borders, Minnesota fur-traders-turned-politicians sought to relocate more Indians in Minnesota, not to remove them from the territory. Anglo-Minnesotans lobbied Congress to receive the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) from Iowa and Wisconsin and also to have the government purchase a million acres of land from the Objibwes on which to resettle Menominees from Wisconsin. Such territorial maneuvering was motivated not by love of Indians, but rather by the desire to capture the economic benefits of the annuity payments settled on the tribes by the federal government in return for forfeiture of their claims to their ancestral lands.⁵⁸ The Ojibwe, meanwhile, had their own reasons for supporting the resettlement of other tribes in Minnesota. They saw the arrival of other tribes from the east as helpful in creating a buffer zone between themselves and the Dakota.⁵⁹

      With the disappearance of the fur trade by mid-century and the advent of the railroad, Fort Snelling’s military focus shifted from the North to the West. Instead of controlling commerce and Indian relations along Minnesota’s waterways, the fort now functioned as a remote command center in the continuing contest over lands further west where plains tribes continued to challenge the claims of the United States to exclusive sovereignty.

      Minnesota’s distinctive borderland society, so long in the making and seemingly so enduring, was quickly and violently unmade. As the fur trade entered a period of both local and global decline, Minnesota offered new rich prospects for resource extraction and agricultural development in which Indian presence on the land was seen by speculators and settlers as an obstacle to progress—and to profit—as it had been further east. Wisconsin Winnebagos who had been settled on timberland in the central part of the territory were divested of that lucrative land and relocated to the prairie in the southwestern part of the territory from where, against their will, they would later be removed again to Dakota Territory, and from there to Nebraska.⁶⁰

      When Congress recognized the last remaining unorganized part of the Old Northwest as the territory of Minnesota in 1849, pressures intensified on native tribes to cede most of their remaining lands to the federal government in return for payments representing a fraction of their market value. The annuity payments the Indians actually received were further diminished by the liens traders had written into the cession treaties, which guaranteed that the credit they had extended to the tribes would be paid first.

      By the time Scott arrived in St. Paul and noted the stately bearing of the Ojibwes he encountered there, Ojibwe claims to land, which in his uncle’s day had encompassed fully half the northern part of the state, had been reluctantly ceded to whites. The remaining six thousand or so tribal members in the state had “relinquished the meadows, forests and wild rice beds of the lake country for the harsh climate, poor soil, and ‘immense swamps’ of new reservations located hundreds of miles from population centers.”⁶¹ In the southern part of the state, the Dakotas, who had actively facilitated the establishment of an American presence at Mendota, the site of Fort Snelling, and along the valleys of the Mississippi’s tributaries, had fared even worse. Their lands and subsistence had been squeezed and encroached on by an influx of land-hungry settlers and speculators and they had been extorted and strong-armed by traders and Indian agents.

      By the outbreak of the Civil War, the once-dominant Dakota had seen their domain reduced to an untenable ribbon of land along the Minnesota River. When the exigencies of war being waged in the East further delayed annuity payments throughout the summer of 1862, frustrated and deeply angry young men launched an attack on white settlers in the Minnesota River valley with tragic consequences. The Dakota attacks on white communities in southern Minnesota left between four hundred and a thousand men, women, and children dead. The killings inflamed the white population of Minnesota against all Indians—not just the fraction of Dakota men who took part in the killing, but also against the majority of the bands who had rebuffed the incitements to war and provided protection for and even taken the side of whites in the conflict.

      The Dakota War reshaped ethnic identity in the four-year-old state. The conflict destroyed the vestiges of the mixed-race border culture and sense of shared kinship between whites and natives. It also marked the beginning of a new phase of conflict between indigenous people west of Minnesota and an encroaching white civilization that would last another two decades. It led, in other words, to the war Scott was hastening to join.

      For the Dakota, the war was devastating. They lost all but a tiny remnant of their once-extensive lands; Congress passed a bill authorizing the exile of Dakota people from the state, annulling all treaties the United States had made with any of the bands and diverting the remaining Dakota annuities to pay reparations to the white victims of the violence.⁶² In the aftermath of the conflict on the Minnesota, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in a gruesome ritual of state-sanctioned retribution the day after Christmas 1862. Hundreds of others were imprisoned for three years at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Some sixteen hundred women, children, and old men, those explicitly not guilty of involvement in the attacks except by virtue of tribal association, were force-marched from their communities on the Minnesota to a prison camp set up below the walls of Fort Snelling, where close to three hundred died during the winter of 1862–63 as the authorities waited for the ice on the Mississippi to melt enough to permit their deportation out of the state. Those who surrendered, including many Sissetunwan and Wahpetunwan who had not fought against the United States, were deported to Crow Creek, Dakota Territory, or imprisoned. Exiled from Minnesota, hundreds, especially children, died of disease and starvation. Others fled onto the western plains and north into Canada.⁶³ The Minnesota state legislature instituted a bounty on Dakota scalps.⁶⁴

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