38 Nooses Page 2
He had survived two smallpox epidemics, played an instrumental role in negotiating treaties ceding millions of acres of Dakota homeland in exchange for annuity payments, and endured the catastrophic thinning of fox and beaver populations that left his people dependent on the United States government and its promises of gold coins and good faith. He had treated, traded, hunted, and politicked with whites, but he declined to cultivate his own farm or to forgo the use of his tepee. He had attended mission churches but had never been baptized a Christian and was a bearer of wakan, the Dakota medicine; as a boy he had fasted and prayed and smoked until visited by his spirit animal, the raven, after which he received an otter-skin medicine bag he would keep until the end of his life. To bear wakan meant a great deal that would remain forever obscure to outsiders, but at the least it made Little Crow a man of spiritual importance, a healer, a carrier of cultural knowledge, and a keeper of mysteries related to the afterlife.
Striking in appearance, grave in countenance, and famous for his physical endurance, Little Crow was also known for his “restless, unquiet disposition” and for a profligate youth that included several advantageous marriages, a lucrative time in the whiskey trade, a turn as a mercenary in support of American forces, and the frequent demonstration of his skill at cards. In 1845, at thirty-five, he had returned to the Mississippi River from his western travels to assume the chieftainship of his old village after hearing that his father, the third Little Crow and the most widely known of the Mdewakanton Dakota, had died. A small flotilla of allies and kin had followed him down the Minnesota River and onto the Mississippi, bringing him home to the village called Kaposia, which stood across the water from the new white settlement of Saint Paul. There he had found two of his half brothers waiting close to shore, armed and adamant about their own claim to the title. Crossing his hands in front of him and refusing to withdraw, Taoyateduta had sustained crippling bullet wounds that left his wrists forever gnarled and bent. His show of bravery won the day: his half brothers departed in ignominy as the new Little Crow’s own fame and influence among the Dakota began to rise.
Taoyateduta, or Little Crow, 1862
That was many years ago. All Dakotas, young and old, now lived on the far slope of catastrophic change. During Little Crow’s childhood, four decades earlier, whites and Dakotas had lived in a rough equilibrium sustained by a long history of council and gift exchange, an active trade in furs, and generations of intermarriage. Then the land had been vast and the human populations far smaller, the lives of frontiersmen and Dakotas connected only weakly to major population centers in the East. Then whites had adjusted to Dakota patterns of life and customs of friendship and exchange. Now the evidence of the Dakotas’ own accommodation to the white world surrounded Little Crow in the form of shorn hair, buttoned shirts, tilled fields, and the frame house beside which he and his fellow Dakotas now gathered.
But what whites hoped was happening and what was happening were never the same thing. Many Dakotas wanted nothing to do with these ever more numerous, insistent, and unfamiliar invaders, even if that fact was wished away by the traders, missionaries, government agents, soldiers, and other whites in the region. A group of fierce young Dakota men, those who once would have been destined for honor as warriors, hunters, and tribal heads, desired a future in which the westward tide of white settlement would be reversed, in which they would take old lands by force in order to restore centuries-old hunting patterns and lifeways, reclaiming their freedom to live and move as they wished. Most of the Dakotas assembled around Little Crow’s tepee were his own closest kin, warriors of the Mdewakanton band, and all were agitated and anxious, waiting to learn what would happen next. The moon was lowering toward the western horizon, a storm visible in the distance. Little Crow had been called to council countless times before, but never with so much at stake. Something was ready to flare, like a grass fire rising to catch a high, dry wind.
Four young men stepped forward to tell their story. The day before they had been hunting off the reservation in the Big Woods, a vast wedge of deciduous forest that covered the center of the state and began in the vicinity of a white settlement called Acton, eighty miles to the northeast. Unsuccessful in their pursuit of game and sharing whiskey on the road, they had stopped at a farmer’s house with the intention of asking for food and drink before the journey back to the Minnesota River. One of the men found a hen’s nest filled with eggs, and out of such a strange, small detail emerged a war. An argument about stealing the eggs, then an accusation of cowardice, and then a dare to shoot the white man: the particulars vary with the telling, but in the end three white men, one woman, and one fifteen-year-old girl lay dead. While the survivors had dashed off to larger settlements to raise an alarm, the four Dakotas had dashed in the other direction, driving across the prairie with a stolen team and wagon through the evening and into the night.
They had returned to their own chief, Red Middle Voice, and their own village, where Rice Creek met the Minnesota River several miles north of Little Crow’s tepee. Together they moved downriver to the larger village of Little Six, the youngest of the Mdewakanton Dakota leaders, newly ascended in influence due to the recent death of his father, whose desire to accommodate white ways he had rejected out of hand. After a set of orations and resolutions, Little Six and his warriors had joined the Rice Creek men, walking and riding six more miles down the river road in the darkest hours of the night, gathering men and women from other villages along the way, and sending runners up and down the valley with the message that something enormous was happening. Soon the swelling caravan had reached and crossed the Redwood River just above its junction with the Minnesota, entering Little Crow’s village even as the earliest fringe of sunlight emerged in the eastern sky.
After the four young men faced Little Crow and told their story, others spoke in turn to present a list of grievances. None of this talk was new, but the repetition held new power, here on the edge of action. Whites had not delivered treaty payments as promised, had failed to appoint honest traders, had married and abandoned Dakota wives, had raped Dakota women. And, as always, they spoke of the vanished land, the ever-tighter boundaries placed around their territory. Village leaders and others lamented how payments of annuity gold had always arrived with unyielding conditions for Indian behavior and cooperation with white authorities, how white possession of Dakota land had never come with any equivalent provisos. Forced to live under rules, customs, and habits not of their invention, they were finding that those rules had been not been written for their benefit, despite promises to the contrary. They were primed to take vengeance on a system that made them easy picking for anyone properly connected to white government, a stream of opportunists who had little personal investment in the well-being of Dakotas and who, in the words of village chief Big Eagle, “always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, ‘I am much better than you.’ ”
This fever for retribution ran high among the members of the tiyotipi, or soldiers’ lodge, a council of young men customarily organized to coordinate hunting parties but now, in this time of great pressure, often acting as an independent gathering of hard-line warriors bent on establishing and enforcing tribal traditions while rejecting all white clothes and customs. For decades, Presbyterian missionaries and other whites had observed the occasional tiyotipi council, but these meetings were not open to outsiders. Ever more influential among the most disgruntled and angry Dakotas and ever more independent of traditional leadership structures, the soldiers’ lodges were now filling with men who felt robbed of their birthright as Dakota men and warriors, men who were ready to fight and willing to die to turn away white encroachment. The members of this newer kind of tiyotipi held themselves apart from all but the most fervent traditionalists and mocked their kin who wore collared shirts and took up agriculture, yet they did not view themselves as a splinter group. Their aim was not to split the Dakota into factions but rather to take an action that could unify the tribe, bringing “farmer” Dakotas, warrior Dakotas, and mixed-bloods together again as one against the pressure of outside occupation.
Little Crow listened to everything and said nothing. He understood that these young men were here not for his rifle but for his voice, that it was his life experience that made him so important to the unfolding drama. He was no longer inclined to play the warrior and knew that the hopes of these headstrong young men rested on an illusion. The waves of white settlers crashing against Dakota lands, tens of thousands arriving every year, had risen too high to turn back. Little Crow had seen the evidence firsthand on two long trips to Washington, D.C., four and eight years ago, and had said so. But he was also aware that the killings near Acton would not go unpunished. All Dakotas would be made responsible for the actions of so few. Whatever challenge to a young man’s courage had been issued over a nest of eggs was magnified a hundredfold in this final council of the long night. No longer could old and new, Dakota and white, pretend to coexist.
When the arguments were complete, Little Crow faced the four young men back from Acton and scolded them for their intoxication and their impulsiveness. In the sixteen years since taking the chieftainship of his village and winning election as speaker of the Mdewakanton Dakota, Little Crow had cultivated a stubborn realpolitik as the whites came west, first by the hundreds and later by the thousands. His curiosity about white ways was keen, but his accommodations were always cautious. He was one of the first Dakota leaders to embrace government farming programs for his people, but he did not till the land himself. He had attended and left white mission schools; later, several of his children did the same. He was as likely to be described, drawn, or photographed in white dress as in warrior regalia. He had fought in the service of white soldiers but was also a leader of Dakota forays against their traditional enemies, the Ojibwe. He was one of the most influential Dakota chiefs to sign major land-cession treaties, in 1851 and 1858, but also one of the first to argue that the treaties were fraudulently kept. He had never been baptized, but the morning before this fateful council he had attended the Episcopal mission church at the Lower Agency, shaking the priest’s hand after the service and chatting amiably.
Little Crow had never been loved for his compromises, but he had once been respected, and here, in the early morning, his considerable power to hold an audience reemerged. The murder of white women, he argued, would bring speedy and indiscriminate retribution down on all of the Dakota, an onslaught they wouldn’t be able to withstand. The delayed annuity payments would never arrive. What was left of Dakota lands would be forfeit, and the Dakota would be pushed westward into alien places bereft of game and good soil and any connection to their ancestors’ bones.
According to one account, Little Crow had his say and then “blackened his face as a sign of mourning, retired to his teepee and covered his head in sorrow.” Painting one’s face with charcoal was a traditional gesture of mourning in many tribes, but it seems that Little Crow was also using it to assert his command of the crowd and make a statement about the costs of an action he felt was now inevitable. For a while his old, practiced charisma held sway, until one of the enraged warriors, bolder than the rest, raised his voice in challenge.
“Taoyateduta is a coward!”
For more than two centuries Dakotas and whites had intermarried, traded, hunted together, and competed in games of chance and physical skill, ever since itinerant French traders and their employees first entered the wide, beautiful territory west of the Great Lakes in the early 1600s. Fox, beaver, elk, and buffalo had seemed innumerable and the world’s demand for fur so great that trapping, hunting, and trade seemed to be a combined effort, collapsing the differences between the Dakota and their transplanted European partners. But even in the friendliest of times, the world of the Upper Mississippi River Valley had always been divided into Dakota and white realms. In many ways this division was absolute, a question not only of history and language but of separate worldviews that created two overlapping realities, side by side, their incompatibility bearing the seeds of catastrophe.
What was frontier to whites, the expanding edge of possibility, was to the Dakota just the opposite: the center of their world, growing smaller. Farms that signaled civilization to settlers were to many Dakotas, even to some who kept small acreages, a tool designed to fence them in, the symbol of a permanent halt to centuries of seasonal migration. White churches brought a message of peace but were unable to absorb other beliefs, always suspicious and dismissive of the complex polytheism of the Dakota spirit world. Whites wrote everything down, mesmerized by tables of numbers; Dakotas lived by a language of spoken tales, remembered and repeated across hundreds of years. Most of all, whites loved hierarchy, each man occupying a rung on the ladder that eventually rose to a single individual in the White House, while Dakotas operated inside a shifting, dispersed power structure that defined leadership as the ability to guide a village, band, or tribe toward consensus. Minnesota was still an infant state, only four years old but brimming over with belief in Manifest Destiny, living an irony typical of the western experience: the only true “Minnesotians” in 1862, the people who had been there first, the people whose language had given the place its name, didn’t care what it was called, where it began and ended, or how it had been made a state.
For more than a year, white men had been killing other white men far to the south and east. A few Indian agency employees had offered to raise companies of Dakota soldiers for the Union army, but these offers had been quickly rejected at the state capital. The war being fought far away was not the Dakota’s war, but still their interest in the great battles was intense. A few of them, including Little Crow, could read some English, and others were made aware of the fighting thanks to the “pictorial papers” that would appear on the counters at the traders’ stores. Many wondered why President Lincoln had already issued three calls for volunteer soldiers and why Thomas Galbraith, the government’s Indian agent for the Dakota, would recruit a company of whites and mixed-bloods he called the Renville Rangers and seek to become its captain unless a great many Minnesotans had already been killed. “The whites must be pretty hard up for men to fight the South,” said Big Eagle, “or they would not come so far out on the frontier and take half-breeds or anything to help them.”
If the Civil War was taking able-bodied whites and mixed-bloods away, many Dakotas were convinced that the conflict had swallowed up their money as well. Four treaties with the United States—one in 1837, two in 1851, and another in 1858—had exchanged Dakota lands for goods, services, and annual payments in gold coin from the United States Treasury. The first treaty, signed by Little Crow’s father and other Dakota chiefs in Washington, D.C., had ceded Dakota lands in the Wisconsin Territory and placed his father’s village and all of his fellow Dakotas west of the Mississippi River. The second and third treaties, the latter bearing Little Crow’s signature on its topmost line, had limited the Dakota to a seventy-mile-long strip along the north and south banks of the upper Minnesota River, forcing thousands of Dakota families with no say in the negotiations to abandon their woodland lodges for new homes on the prairie and forever truncating their world by more than twenty million acres. The fourth treaty, in 1858, had resulted from Little Crow’s own trip to meet with President James Buchanan in the U.S. capital, where he and several of his fellow chiefs agreed to the whites’ demand that they give up the northern bank of the Minnesota River at a rate of thirty cents per acre, allowing the newborn state to accommodate an ever-increasing number of white settlers in search of fertile ground. At both treaty negotiations, Little Crow understood how unpopular his actions would be with many of his fellow Dakotas—he had no love for the outcomes himself—but in the end he signed out of resignation, realism, hope that the federal government might keep some of its promises, and, perhaps, a desire to maintain the only kind of influence that seemed left to a Dakota leader.
In all four cases, central conditions of the treaties had been altered, dismissed, or delayed by Congress during the ratification process; in all four cases, Little Crow and other Dakota chiefs had eventually felt it necessary to sign the amended versions or become helpless. Their only other options, it seemed, were to starve or to move many hundreds of miles farther west, where they would live hemmed in by other, unfamiliar Indian peoples. In every case, white settlers poured onto Dakota land without waiting for federal ratification of the treaties; in every case, large sums of promised gold went instead to politicians and traders, who commanded broker’s fees and made sizable claims, a number of them fraudulent, on the money due to the Dakota; and in every case, shifting conditions of eligibility were placed on the payments that made it impossible for the Dakotas to exercise any remaining rights of independence. In 1857, when a renegade Wahpeton Dakota named Inkpaduta and his men, bitter over unredressed white acts of violence, had killed thirty-eight settlers near Spirit Lake, in Iowa, Mdewakantons had been ordered to give chase to their fleeing kinsmen or forfeit their annuities; one year later, the treaty of 1858 had given special privileges to Dakotas who took up farming, a stipulation that the Indian agents and other white authorities had regularly used to try to bring more resistant tribesmen into line.
In June 1862, two months before the council outside Little Crow’s tepee, thousands of Dakotas had gathered for the yearly disbursement of annuity gold only to be told that the money had been delayed. A rumor had begun to flow up and down the Minnesota River Valley that the Civil War had used up all the Dakota’s gold and that worthless scrip was on its way instead, a rumor lent credence by the news that other northwestern tribes had received a portion of their own yearly payments in paper. After months of hunger, owing to a cutworm infestation the previous summer and a brutal winter that covered many of their food reserves with several feet of snow, a new desperation settled in. Corn and potatoes were plentiful but not yet ripe, and with game in ever shorter supply, the result was a severely imbalanced diet that left many Dakotas malnourished, some dying, and all badly in need of the grains, beans, and meats their annuities could buy.