Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (8 page)

Mille Lacs is drained by the Rum River, named by early explorers with a sense of humor but still earlier known as Wakha’ or “Spirit River.” Many people now think of the name “Rum” as a pretty bad joke. Bogus Brook, a tributary of the Rum (which eventually flows into the Mississippi), is reputed to have been a backwater hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition. Many of the tourists who come to Mille Lacs in the summer are from Chicago. It is said that Al Capone had a house on Mille Lacs, and that he also had a hideout in Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin and at Leech Lake, north of Mille Lacs. It is also said that he had an Indian mistress with whom he was very much in love; some say she was from Mille Lacs, others say she was from Lac Courte Oreilles, and still others say she was from Leech Lake. Everyone wants to claim Al Capone. The casino at Mille Lacs is called Grand Casino, and it is indeed big.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of natural resources Mille Lacs was almost a reservation that wasn’t. In 1825, when representatives from Mille Lacs signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien (along with about 1,000 other delegates from the Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Dakota, Iowa, and others), they were a force to be reckoned with. The meeting had been organized by the United States and was primarily a treaty not between it and the tribes but rather among the tribes themselves. The United States, having gained control of the area after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, no longer had to contend with the British. Now it had to deal with Indians. And at the time, Indians controlled the whole region. Trade and settlement were hampered by constant aggression between the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes along the Minnesota River, the dividing line between their territories. They fought over hunting and trapping rights—each anxious to control more resources than the other. The U.S. government was caught in the middle and feared that continued intertribal warfare would jeopardize the fur trade in the region and the trade routes through it. The United States was the supplicant; the Indian tribes were the power in place. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established an uneasy peace between the warring tribes.

Circumstances, however, changed quickly on the frontier. By 1837 the fur trade was wobbling and about to crash. Animals such as the beaver, muskrat, and otter had been trapped to near-extinction within the domain of the Ojibwe in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Ojibwe, still strong, still a powerful military force, looked east and saw more and more white settlers. They looked west and saw that the Dakota had adopted the horse, had colonized the plains, and were growing stronger. They were being squeezed, and there was nowhere the Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes region could expand their land base. Also, there were no caches of natural resources outside their control that they could bring under their control—no additional rice beds, maple groves, cranberry swamps, or untapped trapping grounds. Starvation was, for many, only a season away. The Ojibwe saw this, and when the United States wanted them to come to the treaty table again in 1837 they said yes.
Chiefs from Leech Lake, Gull Lake, Swan River, St. Croix River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac de Flambeau, La Pointe, Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, Snake River, Fond du Lac, and Red Lake all traveled to the town of St. Peter in present-day Minnesota. It was an impressive array of personalities and power. Present were the chiefs Flat Mouth, Elder Brother, Young Buffalo, Rabbit, Big Cloud, Hole in the Day, Strong Ground, White Fisher, Bear’s Heart, Buffalo, Wet Mouth, Coming Home Hollering, Cut Ear, Wood Pecker, White Crow, Knee, The Dandy, White Thunder, Two Lodges Meeting, Rat’s Liver, First Day, Both Ends of the Sky, Sparrow, Bad Boy, Big Frenchman, Spunk, Little Six, Lone Man, Loons Foot, and Murdering Yell. All of them were decked out in their finest attire and sported the scalps they’d won in battle and eagle feathers notched or colored depending on how they’d killed the enemy (bludgeoned, split down the middle, or stabbed). They brought warriors with them, armed with bows, guns, scalping knives, and war clubs. They entered singing. The white representatives brought maps, whiskey, and money and started talking.

The U.S. government presented its case: it would trade land for money. So while the bands who signed the treaty would give up, on paper, the right to establish villages or homes in large tracts of land including half of present-day Wisconsin and part of central Minnesota, they would retain the right to live in the region and hunt, fish, and trap within and to the entire extent of their former homelands. In addition the government promised to pay the bands the following, every year for twenty years:

$9,500, to be paid in money.

$19,000, to be delivered in goods.

$3,000 for establishing three blacksmith shops, supporting the blacksmiths, and furnishing them with iron and steel.

$1,000 for farmers, and for supplying them and the Indians with implements of labor, with grain or seed, and with whatever else might be necessary to enable them to carry on their agricultural pursuits.

$500 in tobacco.

This didn’t seem like a bad deal as far as the chiefs were concerned. First, and most important to them, they were assured that they could hunt, fish, and trap as they had been doing, without interference or restriction. From the perspective of the chiefs it didn’t seem that they were losing much of anything: they could still live, work, and travel within their homeland, and there was a financial bonus of twenty years during which they wouldn’t want for much. This seemed to quell any concerns they had about the encroachment of whites from the east and the hard border with the Dakota tribes to the west. It seemed like a win-win for the Ojibwe, and they signed the treaty without being able to see the full ramifications of what they’d done. No mention was made of logging in the treaty. Little did they know that they would lose much and wouldn’t regain much of it until more than 150 years later, by which time (according to the logic of the U.S. government) all the Indians should have been either assimilated or dead.

The tribes weren’t able to see the full scope and importance of logging in their ceded territories, and there was no mention of it in the treaty. But the virgin white pine forests of the upper Mississippi would fuel the growth of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago for the next fifty years. And the United States wanted not just some of the pine
but
all
of it.

Another point that the tribes involved didn’t understand was a small but key phrase written into the treaty: “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded is guarantied to the Indians,
during the pleasure
[emphasis added] of the President of the United States.” The president whose pleasure was in question was Martin Van Buren, a
nd as regards the treaty he left well enough alone. But presidents (and their pleasure) change. In 1850 Zachary Taylor canceled the clause in the treaty of 1837 by presidential order. Taylor had spent forty years in the military and seemed to quite like fighting and killing Indians. During the War of 1812 he defended a fort from an attack by Tecumseh. He fought Indians again during the Black Hawk War and was the one who accepted Chief Black Hawk’s surrender. He fought Indians again in Florida during the Seminole Wars. It’s hard to judge such matter
s, but it seems he had a low regard for life—he spent most of his own life taking away the lives of others. So it’s no wonder he tried to do away with what few rights remained with the Mille Lacs Band.

The effect was disastrous. The Indians of the upper Mississippi, who had been living in relative security, suddenly saw the land drop away from them on all sides. It was as if they were now living on islands. They were told they had no rights to hunt, fish, or gather off their reservations. The vast forests of the northern United States were disappearing day by day. These were desperate times.

In the 1840s, on the heels of the 1837 treaty, the U.S. government tried to do to the Ojibwe north and east of Mille Lacs along Lake Superior what had been done to the Cherokee in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama in the 1820s and 1830s: removal. And this was done for the same reasons. Large and valuable mineral deposits, mostly of copper and iron ore, had been discovered in the Lake Superior watershed, and the government wanted them. In 1850 President Zachary Taylor ordered the removal of the Ojibwe living near the ore deposits to new homes in the West. The ostensible reasons for removal were to prevent “injurious contact” between Indians and whites, to move the Indians out of the reach of whiskey traders, and try to concentrate the Ojibwe into one or two small areas so as to better “civilize” them.

Chief Buffalo and others tried to enable the Ojibwe to stay in their homeland and cited the treaty of 1842, which guaranteed them access to their land and the right to stay. In a cruel move, the governor of Minnesota Territory and the subagent for Indian affairs for northern Wisconsin moved the site for annuity payments and services (these included food, blankets, traps, and money) from La Pointe (present-day Madeline Island near Bayfield, Wisconsin) to Sandy Lake (just north of Mille Lacs). They did not provide any way for the Ojibwe of Wisconsin to get to Sandy Lake, a distance of 300 to 500 miles from Ojibwe settlements in the disputed area. Faced with starvation or death, the Ojibwe of Wisconsin paddled and walked to Sandy Lake, where the promised payments failed to appear. More than 630 Ojibwe men, women, and children starved, froze, and died of disease at Sandy Lake in the winter of 1851.

In part because of the callousness of this maneuver and also because of hard lobbying by various chiefs, the removal order was suspended. And in 1852 Chief Buffalo, then over ninety years old, led a delegation to Washington, D.C. He traveled by canoe and train for months until he reached Washington, where he presented President Millard Fillmore with a list of grievances. Fillmore had become president after Taylor died of gastroenteritis; the best thing that ever happened to the Wisconsin Ojibwe might be that Taylor died of stomach flu—a fitting disease after so many Indians had suffered similar deaths. Fillmore, who grew up in poverty, the second of nine children, was much more sympathetic to Indians than Taylor had been. He agreed with Chief Buffalo’s claims, and promised that annuities would be paid in Wisconsin rather than at Sandy Lake. Chief Buffalo would not agree to Fillmore’s terms until permanent reservations had been established in Wisconsin for his people. Fillmore agreed. Permanent reservations were made for the Mississippi and Lake Superior Ojibwe bands. Other rights were included in the treaty as well—these bands would have the right to hunt, fish, and gather up to 100 percent of the available resources in order to maintain a modest standard of living within the treaty area. This, in effect, gave them an easement to all the land of northwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota, regardless of what happened to that land later. Fillmore’s last words before dying—directed at his soup—were the same sentiments expressed by the Ojibwe chiefs he treated with so fairly: “The nourishment is palatable.”

The Mille Lacs Band went back to the table again in 1855 and signed another treaty with the government, trying to salvage what it could of its rights and sovereignty. The band members were guaranteed 60,000 acres at the southern end of Mille Lacs Lake. But while they were assured a homeland on the southern portion of the lake, the north half was opened to logging—and the loggers weren’t necessarily willing to stop at the reservation boundary. Then 1862 arrived.

To the south of Mille Lacs, along the Minnesota River, the old dividing line between Dakota and Ojibwe tribes, the former enemies of the Ojibwe were experiencing similar difficulties. More and more white settlers were creeping into the fertile Minnesota River valley with the encouragement of the U.S. government. Just as to the north loggers were claiming more and more forest, farmers were squatting in larger numbers in Dakota territory. The Dakota were facing starvation. The promises made by the U.S. government regarding treaty annuities and food had proved empty. There is some disagreement about whether the conflict was a spontaneous development or a strategic decision. Either way, the Dakota, having had enough and realizing that the United States was tied up in a war with the Confederacy, which the Union might very well lose, decided it was time to kick all the whites out of their territories. Such was the situation when, on August 17, 1862, a Dakota foraging party attacked a farm near Acton, Minnesota. Three men and two women were killed.

The Dakota quickly convened their leaders, who decided that the settlers and the U.S. Army would be sure to come down on them. So they went on the offensive, with the Dakota chief Little Crow in the lead. The next day, August 18, a party of Dakota warriors attacked the Lower Sioux Indian Agency near Redwood Falls, killed all those present, and took control of the agency. A relief party had been sent from Fort Ridgely. The Dakota surprised them and killed them all. Attacks continued over the next week. Fort Ridgely was besieged and the settlement of New Ulm was attacked. New Ulm was so badly burned that the residents who survived the attack fled. The Dakota killed all the men they encountered—settlers and soldiers alike—and took the women and children captive. General Sibley sallied forth from Fort Snelling at the head of a contingent of 1,400 soldiers. They chased Little Crow up the Minnesota River and a standoff ensued. Meanwhile, some Ojibwe bands, mostly Pillager Band warriors from Leech Lake, decided to lend support to the Dakota and swept down from the north.

But not all Dakota or Ojibwe thought war was a good idea. Some Dakota near Shakopee didn’t fight, and many protected their white neighbors. Likewise, the Ojibwe at Mille Lacs decided that they would not join the Pillagers. What’s more, they refused to let the Pillagers pass through their territories and sent them back north, thereby protecting their neighbors. The Dakota and Ojibwe who refused to fight might have done so out of neighborliness and out of self-interest, feeling that their relatives would be defeated and judgment would be harsh. They were, and it was.