2
Wisconsin Death March
Many soon leased or sold their “head rights” to the land they had acquired and
promptly returned to Canada. In contrast were the responses of several major groups of Indians
that evaded or avoided the plans of Americans by one device or another. Numerous Potawatomi,
Ohio Ottawa, and smaller numbers from other tribes slipped across the international border, using
Canada as a temporary or permanent refuge, while others moved into northeastern Michigan or northern
Wisconsin. Then there were more who—like those master escape artists, the Winnebago—simply refused
to stay put after being repeatedly transported west of the Mississippi.12 Moving Indians into western lands selected by Americans for their supposedly exclusive and permanent
occupation was one matter; keeping them there was an entirely different and often far more difficult
one. As the exasperated Governor Alexander Ramsey complained from Minnesota Territory in the
fall of 1851, “No argus-eyed vigilance on the part of officers of the Indian department can erect
Chinese wall between this tribe [the equestrian Winnebago] and the in habitants of Wisconsin.13 His annoyance stemmed not only from the reluctance of dislocated Indians to stay where they were
replanted, but also from the willingness of many Americans near their former homes to tolerate
or even ease their return. Obviously, the removal policy at this date was out of tune with the
disposition of peregrinating Indians and with the sentiments of numerous citizens of Wisconsin
and Michigan as well. Although his grievance was expressed a year after the scheme for displacing
the Lake Superior Chippewa was conceived and set in motion, Ramsey had been one of the four actors
most responsible for the design and through 1851 had actively promoted efforts to carry it out.
If other Indians like the Winnebago could not—short of building and manning a “Chinese wall”—be
separated from their old homes, then what sense was there in Ramsey’s conniving to transport
west yet another large population of manifestly unwilling, notably ambulatory Indians? That the
Chippewa were to be settled within the governor's jurisdiction, however temporarily, is but part
of a necessarily complex answer to this query. There were, to be sure, considerable political
and economic rewards to be gain ed simply from the business of transporting Indians westward,
as Ramsey knew, even should they immediately counter march. Yet this fragment of an explanation
still leaves a larger puzzle. How, in 1850, did a Secretary of the Interior, a Commissioner of
Indians Affairs, a Territorial Governor, and a lowly Indian Sub-Agent come to concoct a scheme
that, in the end, caused the loss of many Chippewa lives and yet left the Chippewa in Wisconsin?
The scheme was designed a dozen years after Andrew Jackson and other leading advocates of removal
had declared implementation of the policy a success, “as having been practically settled.14
The United States of 1850 was no longer the geographically compact republic anticipated
in 1803 when Jefferson first conceived of defusing federal-state tensions by displacing unwanted
Indians into a vast, newly acquired western territory. Nor was it the developing nation of 1825,
when a “permissive” policy of community-by-community resettlement was is sued by Executive Proclamation,
or that of 1830, when the formal, comprehensive, nationwide provisions of the Indian Removal
Act obtained congressional sanction.15
By 1850, the ideology of Manifest Destiny had been announced and affirmed, the Mexican war won,
Continentalism achieved. No national leader could any longer confidently believe that conflicts
involving culturally alien, not readily assimilable Indians might be avoided by relocating them
“permanently” in a huge western Indian Territory on lands that would be forever theirs. By 1850,
this was no more a realistic plan than was the abortive parallel policy of reducing sectional
tensions over slavery by repatriating Afro-Americans to Liberia.’16
The political pressure for Indian Removal was effectively removed by events of the
latter 1840s, which saw the emergence of a geographically larger, socially more complex United
States. The new continental nation was far more diverse ethnically than it had been when the
removal and repatriation schemes were conceived. Nevertheless, through the 1830s and 1840s the
promise of permanency of tenure on tribal lands in an exclusively Indian Territory legislated
in the 1830 Removal Act (essentially a segregated native homeland or apartheid policy) was confirmed
in every proper removal treaty. No such stipulation was included in those negotiated with the
Lake Superior Chippewa in 1837 and 1842 for the cession of their lands east of the Mississippi.
The 1850 effort to dislodge them from Wisconsin and to resettle them near Sandy Lake—east of
the Mississippi —involved a temporary location only, be cause of their specific history of dealings
with the United States. Occupying the farthest northwestern reaches of the Old Northwest,
the Lake Superior Chippewa were the last Indians of that Territory to have their independence
erased by formal treaty agreement with the United States. Although placed under nominal American
sovereignty in the 1783 Treaty of Paris and again in the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, this was
a status unknown to these Indians—who remained in a position of unqualified political autonomy.
The degree of their continuing independence was marked by two developments. Unlike other foraging
bands near them, they had sat out the War of 1812, declining British invitations to join in active
military operations.
Thus, not considered enemies by American authorities, they did not participate in
any of the several subsequent peace treaties pressed on neighboring Indians— including related
Chippewa bands—when hostilities ended. These postwar compacts restored the status quo antebellum
and required a fresh acknowledgment of American authority in the region, which the Lake Superior
Chippewa had yet to deliver. Moreover, throughout the removal era, the Lake Superior Chippewa
continued a century-old pattern of war fare against their Dakota neighbors, as good a measure
as any of their autarchy and a major concern of Americans at tempting to impose peace on this
frontier. Such concerns were expressed between 1825 and 1827, when three treaties were required
at last to bring all these small, scattered Chippewa bands under some measure of American authority.17
These agreements established the meets and bounds of Lake Superior Chippewa lands, declared a
“peace” between the Chippewa and their Indian neighbors, defined a new subordinate political
status for them, and included provisions for modest educational services and the payment of a
minor annual annuity. So far as American authorities were concerned, these Chippewa thereby became
dependent client societies. Yet for a decade these agreements had little consequence for the
daily lives of these Indians. No lands were ceded, while the small annuity fund and scanty Indian
Office services provided were delivered mainly to those Chippewa living near Sault Ste Marie.
For another full decade, contacts between the Lake Superior Chippewa and Americans, other than
traders and a few ineffective missionaries, remained occasional and minor. However, these three
treaties expressed the legal foundation for the Chippewa’s political and
economic future. The “tribal” boundary agreements, for example, were in tended to ease, and were
later used for, land sale negotiations, whereas at Fond du Lac (Duluth) in 1826, American negotiators
had obtained a vaguely defined privilege from the Chippewa: “to search for, and carry away, any
metals or minerals from any part of their country.”18
Sixteen years later, when at La Pointe the Chippewa were pressed hard to cede their
last remaining lands east of the Mississippi River, this seemingly minor stipulation about exploration
for mineral samples was used as a weapon to defeat their resistance. For nearly a decade following
acknowledgment of their dependent status, few new settlers or entrepreneurs appeared among them,
especially in the interior away from the watercourses. Then, in 1836, a variety of developments
prompted both Chippewa leaders and American authorities to arrange the first of a series of land
cession treaties. Among the Chippewa, the initiative came, significantly, from those along the
upper Mississippi River, who with other bands were increasingly disturbed by declining income
from the fur trade and were jealous of neighboring native peoples receiving annuities from the
United States when they had none. Taking advantage of Joseph N. Nicollet’s exploration of the
Mississippi's headwaters, these Chippewa sent a delegation with this French astronomer-mathematician
on his return to Fort Snelling. There Flat Mouth of the Pillager band near Leech Lake, the most
prominent leader among the Mississippi bands, declaimed a list of their miseries and wants. Other
tribes, including the Chippewa of Michigan, he complained to Agent Lawrence Taliaferro, “are
doing better than us. They have treaties we hear, and they have goods and money. . . We hear
of treaties every day with our Nation on the lakes and yet not a plug of tobacco reaches us on
the Mississippi . . we wish to know when we might have our expectations realized.”19
Unknown to the Chippewa, American authorities were already moving to ar range a
cession of portions of their lands. That February the Senate had directed the Executive Branch
to arrange a purchase of tracts north of the Wisconsin River. Seen from Washington, the aim was
to obtain control of the shores of Lake Michigan and the Upper Mississippi, both to make the
whole course of that stream the “barrier” between Indians and the organized states and territories
and to gain legitimate access to the vast pine forests of the region.20
The latter represented a legislative response to the growing demand for pine lumber
to build the proliferating new towns of the Mississippi Valley, a demand that had far out distanced
the supply of reasonably priced lumber shipped from western New York and Pennsylvania. Moreover,
on the edges of the Chippewa’s pine forests pro per, a coterie of long-resident entrepreneurs,
recognizing a profitable new market when they heard of it, were already maneuvering to obtain
private control of these valuable Chippewa resources. These were the old-line principals in the
fur trade, the heirs and assigns of the dismantled American Fur Company, as well as smaller independent
traders, led by such notables as Hercules L. Dousman, Samuel C. Stambaugh, H. H. Sibley, William
Aitken, and Alexis Bailey. For a number of years, these experienced local residents had been
exploiting their personal ties among the Chippewa and other tribes, obtaining from them leases
for sawmill sites and timber cutting rights in “Indian country.”21
Operating in the gray areas of Federal Indian law, their activities were scarcely slowed by an
imperative directive from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs prohibiting such private contracts.
