Wisconsin Death March:
Explaining The Extremes in
Old Northwest Indian Removal1
James A. Clifton -- a Frankenthal Professor of Anthropology
and History, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
Throughout the fall of 1850, four officials of Zachary Taylor’s administration
conspired to lure the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians away from their lands in Northern Wisconsin
and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.2
Two of these officials, Secretary of the
Interior Thomas Ewing and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Orlando Brown, provided the initial
approval for the plan, but they did not remain in office long enough to witness its disastrous
results. The others, Minnesota Territory's governor, Alexander Ramsey, and Sub-Agent John Watrous,
were directly involved as prime movers from start to end. By moving the place for the annual
annuity payments to a new temporary sub-agency at Sandy Lake on the east bank of the upper Mississippi
and by stalling the delivery of annuity goods and money, they planned to trap the Chippewa by
winter weather, thus forcing them to remain at this remote, isolated location. This scheme, kept
secret from both local Americans and the Chippewa, was designed to break the tenacious resistance
of these Indians, who had rebuffed earlier efforts to persuade them to resettle in northwestern
Minnesota. The stratagem failed. It succeeded only in reinforcing the opposition of the Chippewa
to relocation even though it had killed large numbers of them: of the some three thousand (mostly
adult males) who gathered at Sandy Lake in early October, some four hundred died before the survivors
could make their way back to their homes by the following January.3
This incident was demonstrably atypical of the experiences of the two dozen other
Indian populations in the Old Northwest who were subject to the Indian Removal policy between
1825 and the early 1850s.4 On the contrary,
judged by the degree of physiological stress and the casualty rate suffered during the relocation
process, the Lake Superior Chippewa case represents an extreme. As such, it deserves special
attention, since it and others like it generated much contemporaneous commentary while exposing
the interests, aims, and intrigues of the diverse denominational, political, economic, and ethnic
interests directly involved. Moreover, because it represents one extreme, to be fully understood,
this Chippewa case must be compared with other cases of Old Northwest Indians subject to dislocation
and resettlement. By examining the Lake Superior Chippewa case both intensively and comparatively,
we can better appreciate how Old Northwest Indian communities reacted resourcefully and variously
to American policy initiatives. In the Chippewa case the Indians drew effectively on a variety
of relationships with and the support of Wisconsin citizens to oppose the interlocking national,
regional, and local patronage system which, rather than “settlement pressure,” had fueled the
drive for their relocation. Although these Chippewa were certainly victimized by a few American
officials and punished by events under no individuals control, ultimately they emerged from this
confrontation as victors. During the three years following the abortive effort to dislodge them,
they effectively maneuvered, procrastinated, and negotiated to a standstill those function aries
still bent on their dislocation, and in the end achieved their major goal of remaining on reservations
within their preferred habitats in Wisconsin and Michigan by explicit treaty-specified right.
Moreover, the Chippewa were not alone among the Indians of the Old Northwest in successfully
thwarting American efforts to implement the removal policy. Systematic study of the diverse responses
of the two dozen groups of Indians in the region subject to the various tactics of Americans
to move them west makes this eminently clear and contributes further insights into the distinctive
features of the Chippewa case. Of the more than forty efforts between 1825 and 1855 to bring
about the west ward resettlement of Old Northwest Indians, there were just four where outright
force, or—as in the Chippewa example— furtive deception and trickery, were employed to produce
the results desired by federal administrators. In these few cases, the coercive tactics used
contributed to extraordinary hardship and fatalities, consequences that can be, in some part,
plausibly attributed to the actions of American authorities. The other three involved Black Hawk’s
band of recalcitrant Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo in 1831—1832, certain
villages of the Indiana Potawatomi in 1838, and the Winnebago intermittently over the course
of a decade and more after 1838.5
Although each of these four cases had its own distinguishing features, they shared
a series of specific common antecedents, one or more of which were lacking in all other attempts
to dislodge and to relocate groups of Old Northwest Indians. These features in combination conditioned
the resort by Americans to coercion or deception. In sequence, the first of these was a serious,
prolonged, public dispute over the legitimacy of a treaty obligation, with the Indians vehemently
denying the right of Americans to demand the surrender of particular tracts and their resettlement
and with their adversaries hewing to the right to evict. Next, such a dispute had to be moved
to a crisis point, with the Indians adamantly rejecting further American efforts at verbal persuasion
and the various incentives proffered. Finally, there had to be present politically influential
local Americans with strong vested interests in securing the dislocation, transportation, and
resettlement in particular places of the Indians involved. These interests were varied and inter
twined. They included some combination of local political prestige, career enhancement, visionary
dreams of ecclesiastical colonies, control of patronage resources, profound power needs, ideological
convictions, the need for immediate income, the aim of thwarting rivals, the lure of capital
accumulation, and others more or less distinguishable in the historical record.6
Lacking one or more of these three conditions, American authorities did not use
force to drive Indians west in a manner that fits the “Trail of Tears” stereotype. Ordinarily,
officials relied on personal influence, on oral argument (enumerating what they defined as the
positive inducements for moving and the disincentives for remaining), and on the dispositions
of the Indians to cooperate in what must be defined as encouraged, but not forced, migrations.
Similarly, numerous groups of Old Northwest Indians, some times differing with Americans on the
stipulations in treaty engagements, some times not, did not press the issue, but instead
escaped or evaded the removal policy entirely. By avoiding direct confrontation, such dissidents
avoided a situation in which Americans were moved to use the exorbitantly expensive, often ineffective,
and morally demeaning option of armed escort and manifest compulsion. Three different cases together
represent the antithesis of the Lake Superior Chippewas’ extraordinary experience. In September,
1837, the Mdewakonton Dakota (Sioux), for example, sold their remaining claim to lands in western
Wisconsin in what has been called a “removal” treaty. However, their relocation was to them a
profitable non-event. As their capable agent, Lawrence Taliaferro, remarked in 1836, they were
only maintaining the semblance of a presence in their former territory east of the Mississippi
“so as to get a good price for it in case of a desire on the part of the U States to purchase.”7
They had earlier abandoned these lands, owing to pressures from intrusive Chippewa
and other ecological and social imperatives (well described by Gary C. Anderson).8
With the help of Agent Taliaferro, who blew fluff into the ears of Washington officials
about the desirability of “removing” these Indians to the west, the Dakota leaders then negotiated
a treaty that provided them nearly a million dollars for lands they could neither safely occupy
nor productively use. As of the fall of 1837, there were no Dakota east of the Mississippi to
be “removed.” Prompted and advised by Taliaferro, they had seen in the removal policy an opportunity
for large profits at no cost to themselves. The Dakota were not alone among Indians of the region
who recognized positive incentives in American initiatives that others, such as the Chippewa
bands nearby, defined as menacing rather than beneficial. Among those Indians who found opportunities
in the removal policy were two groups that could not be touched by American authority,
for they were British subjects residing in Canada. These voluntary participants came from among
the Hurons of Anderdon Township and the Christian Indians (i.e., Moravian Delaware) of New Fairfield,
Canada West. Both represented schismatic divisions of fully Christianized, literate, self-governing,
predominantly English-speaking communities organized as townships in the Province of Canada.9
In both these cases, the decision to emigrate came after a long irresolvable factional
dispute involving efforts of the Crown to purchase large portions of their reserved estates.
Those who elected to emigrate were groups who favored both the sale and emigration to the West,
moves long blocked by their rivals. In neither instance was there a hint of American influence
during the preliminaries. Instead, responding to solicitations from related peoples with similar
concerns in the United States, both the Moravian and the Huron factions approached American authorities
for per mission to participate in the removal pro gram. For the Moravians, the invitation had
come from the “Missouri Party” of the Stockbridge-Munsee in eastern Wisconsin, a faction which
also favored resettlement.10 Theirs was a
considerable feat-of-arms, certainly demonstrating great enthusiasm for the journey. For in 1837
some 202 Moravians departed the Thames River valley in open Mackinaw boats, rowing their way
across the western Great Lakes, via the Green Bay-Fox-Wisconsin River waterway to the Mississippi,
and then traveling by steamer to St. Louis and eastern Kansas. In 1843, fewer Anderdon Hurons
traveled west—making an easier trip of it by canal boat and river steamer—with their relatives
and Methodist confreres among the Ohio Wyandot. In neither instance did all from these Canadian
emigrant parties long remain in the Indian Territory.”11