Abbie's Story -- iii

The Gardner cabin today

Like several other Sioux headmen, Inkpaduta refused to buy into the treaty/reservation system, the white man’s view of how “Indians” should live. He despised the enforced settlement created by treaties. The Minnesota State Historical Society describes the Treaty of 1851, signed just north of St. Peter, Minnesota, just six years previous, this way:

At Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota ceded 35 million acres. At Mendota, the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands ceded about 14 million acres. The combined payment was about $3,075,000. Most of this money was to be paid in the form of annuities. At Traverse des Sioux, Dakota leaders signed—some later said they were tricked into signing—the infamous “Traders’ Paper.” This agreement turned over most of the Dakotas’ cash payments to their mixed-blood relatives and to traders, who had allowed debts to mount over the years in expectation of tapping into the flow of the government’s “Indian money.

Treaty at Traverse des Sioux, 1851

Signing the treaty meant being forced to live and stay within the boundaries of a territory twenty miles wide along the Minnesota River. Buffalo hunts west of the Missouri River kept people in food for some time; more than that, however, the hunt had become a ritual with cultural and religious significance. Not being able to leave the reservation meant the death of a way of life. Inkpaduta was unwilling to cede that to the Great Father in Washington or the settlers swarming into a region they’d always considered free. Moreover, annuities were frequently late; some never came. Some were disgusting.

Inkpaduta had lost a friend and blood relative who had been brutally murdered along with his wife and children, all of them killed by a white man, a much-hated liquor peddler. After the murders, that man had gone farther west to avoid prosecution. When, later, Inkpaduta attempted to get justice from white man’s courts, he came away claiming he’d received nothing but indifference.

That the Waupekutes had cause to fight the new settlers is understandable: white people had no right to take land that had always been theirs. But the Wahpakutes’ brutality left pioneer families throughout the region repulsed and fearful and therefore vigilant. For hundreds of miles in every direction, new white settlers left their farms and circled up behind quickly constructed walls to escape the carnage they assumed was coming.