Wisconsin Death March

   After returning to their homes, the Chippewa were even more determined to avoid removal. Neither would they at any time of the year so much as visit Sandy Lake, which they now defined as a “graveyard.” Once information of the winter's carnage became public, Watrous came under sharp, continuing attack from the Chippewa and their now numerous supporters. Missionary groups, regional newspapers, and local citizens led the opposition, and the legislatures of Wisconsin and Minnesota aided, while the Chippewa themselves began organizing a series of memorials and delegations to Governor Ramsey and to Washington. Within six months the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Luke Lea, and the Secretary of the Interior responded to this lobbying effort, seemingly in favor of the Chippewa. On August 25, 1851, the Secretary issued instructions apparently rescinding the 1850 removal order. Transmitted to Watrous by telegraph, this information became immediate public knowledge, spread by the Lake Superior News in an account highly favorable to the Chippewa. A few weeks later, leaders from the La Pointe and other bands traveled to Sault Ste Marie for a grand “Indian Jubilee” celebrating their victory. The rejoicing was premature. Although the removal order itself was publicly withdrawn, actual efforts to accomplish this goal were not ended; for the requirement that annuities be paid only to Chippewa in the west remained in force, and Agent Watrous continued determined efforts to dislodge them on an even larger scale than earlier.74 Backed by Governor Ramsey, Watrous had begun active, large-scale removal operations early in the year, and these continued through 1851 and 1852 irrespective of publicized instructions from Washington. Recognizing that the Chippewa would have nothing to do with Sandy Lake, Watrous selected Crow Wing and Fond du Lac as destinations more likely acceptable to them. He marshalled his forces, employed more personnel, placed influential marginals such as William W. Warren and missionaries such as W. L. Boutwell on his payroll, stock- piled resources, let contracts, issued assembly orders, called for troops to aid his work (which were refused), and scurried around the region working to lure the Chippewa out of their ceded territory, all the while affecting to keep his plans secret from the Chippewa and their American allies. The one major incentive Watrous had was the annuity fund, now doubled because of the accumulation of 1850 and 1851 installments. To increase the pressure he refused payment in Wisconsin to any subdivision of the Chippewa: Pagan, Christian, Successful Farmer, New Land Owner, Half-Breed, Lake Shore Fisher man, Interior Hunter, whatever. And in autumn, 1851, he made plain that he still favored the same deception plan and tactics that had proved so disastrous a year earlier. “It is my intention,” he reported to Ramsey on September 22, “to delay (unless otherwise instructed) making the moneyed payment of the present year to the Chippewas of Lake Superior until after navigation ceases, which is done to throw every obstacle in the way of their returning to their old homes.” The governor did not otherwise instruct.”75
   However, in spite of all the preparations and expenditures, most Chippewa would have nothing to do with these plans. Many traveled to Fond du Lac or Crow Wing that fall; after obtaining their annuities, few tarried to experience a repeat of the previous year’s debacle. Nonetheless, the newly promoted Agent Watrous proclaimed near total success, reporting that only seven hundred Chippewa remained in the east subject to later removal. His reports were seconded by Governor Ramsey, who also professed victory in his Annual Report. Both were dissembling, as local citizens, employees of the removal effort, missionaries, the newspapers, and the Indians themselves well knew. The Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula Chippewa remained within their old band territories, irrespective of the change in their status caused by Wisconsin's statehood and the cession of their lands. 76
   These attempts to dislodge the Lake Superior Chippewa continued through 1852, but with diminishing effect. As the protests of the Chippewa and their allies grew in volume, and evidence of costly failures mounted, a final delegation to Washington at last produced success. Following a meeting of old Psheke from La Pointe with the President in late June, 1852, when another petition from the citizens of the Lake Superior shore was presented, Millard Fillmore finally canceled the removal authorization entirely. Of even greater value to the Chippewa, the President now approved the payment of back, current, and future annuities at La Pointe. The Chippewa vic tory was complete two years later. Then, after a Democratic President had taken power in Washington, a new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny, dismantled the old Indian removal policy and installed a new pro gram emphasizing concentration on reservations and economic development in place. On September 30, 1854, the Lake Superior Chippewa signed their last treaty with the United States, one severing relationships with the Mississippi bands, and guaranteeing them the right to reside on and take their subsistence from reservations within the environments they had long inhabited.77  Forty years ago, in the first attempt to find order in the implementation of the removal policy among the Indians of the Old Northwest, Grant Foreman concluded that their resettlement was, “hap-hazard, not coordinated, and wholly un systematized,” and further asserted that the whole period for these peoples was characterized by no pattern.78 But if we plot the different responses of all Old Northwest Indian societies to the removal policy against the basic forms of their adaptations to broad biotic zones, their different types of social organization, and the paths and various goals of American intrusions into their lands, a clear matrix emerges. This underlying pattern yields a near mutually exclusive distribution of those Indian communities that did resettle in the western Indian Territory against those that did not. By placing their activities into a broader social context, this pattern also helps to make understandable the Chippewa’s resistance to relocation. The Chippewa of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin were by no means alone in their successful resistance to this American inspired and commanded resettlement program. Despite repeated efforts running over many years, the federal authorities entirely failed in efforts to dislodge any of the native societies in the Great Lakes region similar to these Chippewa in basic social organization, technology, subsistence economy, environmental adaptation, and culture. Those Old Northwest Indians whose assessments of the removal policy were most strongly negative were foraging peoples, dependent on hunting, fishing, and gathering for their subsistence, while they exchanged for manufactured goods and money the same products needed for their own sustenance. They inhabited biotic zones characterized by numerous streams, marshes, and lakes, with long, harsh winters and extensive deciduous and coniferous forests. They were also skilled builders and users of framed-up bark canoes, their main means of transportation. And their direct contacts and experience with the western prairie lands were few or none.79
   Thus, the Lake Superior Chippewa’s success in thwarting implementation of the removal policy was true also of extensive populations of other Chippewa communities, and the Menomini, Ottawa, and those Potawatomi villages on the Lake Michigan shore above present Milwaukee. Organized as small, autonomous bands, these native peoples had maintained their political, social, cultural, and religious integrity to a degree well beyond those of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Moreover, throughout the era these Old Northwest Indians were not surrounded by Americans, agriculturalists or otherwise. Hence they and Americans were not immediately in open competition for the resources of the same environments. These foraging bands, confidently following their own cultural and adaptational trajectories, recognized no advantage in westward migration away from habitats familiar to them. Instead, they defined this possibility as greatly damaging to their welfare. Indeed, several thousand Indians from these communities, when faced with the prospect of closer dealings with Americans and their authorities, did voluntarily abandon their lands in the United States. But these slipped across the international border into Canada and resettled in locations similar in climate, flora, and fauna to those they had abandoned.80 To the south an entirely different pat tern of Indian responses to the removal policy emerged. In striking contrast to the reactions of the foraging bands in the northern reaches of the Old Northwest, when the era closed all the Indians there—with some few exceptions—had been dislocated and resettled in the west. These were multi-community tribal societies such as the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Kickapoo, and Sauk. They occupied habitats characterized by relatively long growing seasons, prairie and parklands, fertile bottom lands, and hardwood forests. They lived in large, semi-permanent villages, and their traditional economies had been based on a mix of intensive horticulture and large-game hunting.81
   Moreover, well before the removal era began in 1825 they had been forced to adapt to a new environmental reality: large numbers of American farmers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and developers were a significant and threatening part of their milieu. Occupying the ground directly in the path of the post-Revolutionary frontier, for decades their relations with these newcomers had been marked by intense, open rivalries, for they were involved in sometimes violent competition for the same environmental resources. Thus they had long been involved in land cessions. Some, like the Mdewakanton in 1837, had more or less eagerly exchanged less critical portions of their estates for goods, immediate cash payments, and annuities. Others had been driven to such sales by intense pressures from appointed negotiators and other interested parties. Understandably, the effects of the removal policy fell on them earlier and heavier than on the northern foragers like the Chippewa. Indeed, the first treaties with any Indians— either of the Old Northwest or the Southeast—to be impelled by and obtained under the specific terms of the 1830 Removal Act were negotiated with several such communities in Ohio.82 These farming, large-game hunting tribal societies of the Old Northwest's prairie lands were also distinct from the foraging bands to the north in another salient characteristic. While the foragers remained committed to bark canoe transport, those to the south had long since abandoned such frail vessels in favor of horses. Indeed, twenty years before Thomas Jefferson conceived of using the newly acquired Louisiana Territory as a suitably distand homeland for Indians, numerous Shawnee, and Delaware, followed by lesser numbers of Kickapoo, Ilini, and Potawatomi, had used their new means of travel voluntarily to abandon their land in the Old Northwest and reset-tie in Missouri and Arkansas, with some going as far west as Texas.83   Since horses facilitated East-West movement of people and goods across the valleys of the great mid-continent river systems, even those who stayed in the remains of their old tribal estates were enabled to add seasonal horse-nomadism for purposes of hunting, trade, diplomacy, and war to their technological inventory. Oriented to large game hunting from the start, when they faced increased competition with Americans near their lands, they used horses to bring the resources of the western environments within their reach. Hence, by 1825 not only were many from these prairie tribes familiar with the western environments, but several related pioneer Indian communities were al ready well established there. Indeed, through the 1830s, emissaries from such western trail breakers often visited their kin in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, soliciting new recruits and allies.84  The Lake Superior Chippewa, and other bark canoe-using foragers of the north, had no such experiences, technological capacity, relationships, or inclinations. There were some few exceptions to this general dislocation and westward resettlement of the prairie tribes. These included some hundreds of Indiana Miami and fewer Michigan Potawatomi who were allowed, by negotiated Treaty tight, to re main on small parcels in their old environments.85
   Then there were the many who escaped the full consequences of American policy by resettling in British territory. These included numerous horse- nomadic Potawatomi, Ohio Ottawa, and others who settled on the Ontario Peninsula. Making appropriate ecological choices, these voluntary emigrants selected locations south of the Canadian Shield region, in habitats and a climate like those familiar to them. These im migrants studiously avoided British efforts to concentrate on the—to them— barren landscape of Manitoulin Island, further demonstrating the significance of both environmental adaptations and the capacity of Old Northwest Indians to bend the policies of powerful states to their own wants and ends.86 More recently than Foreman, Prucha, stressing the extensive prior moves of the Old Northwest’s native peoples, concluded that “the emigration of these tribes in the Jacksonian era was part of their migration history.87
   Such an interpretation places the most charitable interpretation conceivable on this American policy, but it does not distinguish one type of migration from another; neither does it look far beneath the surface appearances of events. Such an interpretation is rather like concluding that the experience of  Japanese-Americans between 1942 and 1946 may be adequately explained as part of their prior migration history as well. In a larger historical perspective, none of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Indian societies had ever experienced a program quite like the American removal policy as arranged and conducted in the years after 1825. Some, such as the Ontario Iroquoian and Michigan’s Algonquian  horticultural tribes, during the second half of the seventeenth century had been refugees, fleeing the ravages of war, pestilence, and starvation. Many had sometimes responded to the incentives offered by French or British traders and officials in selecting sites for new settlements. For more, including the Chippewa, their earlier migrations were in response to internal stresses such as population increase, intracommunity conflict, resource depletion, or a particularly successful adaptation to new technologies and economic opportunities.

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