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, and 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 matters, 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