and submit to military authority on the reservations.50
With a population that had recently surpassed 350,000, Chicago was a very different place from the small collection of huts around Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River where Scott’s uncle David Hunter had been stationed with the Fifth Infantry in 1828. There, Uncle David had once bor rowed a Potawatomi Indian canoe to paddle across the Chicago River to bring back Jefferson Davis, who had been lost while on an expedition from Fort Winnebago to search for deserters. The canoe was built for one man, so to ferry Davis across, Hunter directed him to lie down on the bottom and then sat on him in order to keep the center of gravity low enough to avoid capsizing the canoe. Hunter and Davis also served together in the first regiment of Dragoons organized to police and intervene in settler-Indian relations in the trans-Mississippi West. They had remained friends until the outbreak of the Civil War.51
Besides the frontier experiences related by his uncle David Hunter, Chicago summoned up more personal memories from Scott’s own past; the city had been his family’s home from the age of six to eight, when his father had been a professor at the Theological Seminary of the Northwest (now McCormick Theological Seminary). It was from here that the young family accompanied him back to Princeton where he died in 1861.
From Chicago Scott continued on to St. Paul, the rough-hewn river capital of Minnesota, where he began to get “the feeling of the proximity of the frontier.” Here, he encountered “blanket” or unassimilated, Indians for the first time: “tall, straight Chippewa [Ojibwe] Indians, wrapped in their blue and scarlet [trade] blankets, striding about in a very dignified way.”52 Shortly before Scott’s arrival, the outlaw Jesse James and the Younger brothers had attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, some forty miles to the south of the capital. Several of the gang had been killed after they shot the cashier and were attempting to flee out of town. The body of one of the dead gang members was exhibited in the window of a store on Third Street close to the hotel where Scott was staying, adding to his sense that he had arrived at civilization’s edge.
Like Pittsburgh, St. Paul had grown up under the aegis of a frontier fort established in Indian Country at the strategic confluence of two rivers. Scott’s Uncle David had preceded his protégé here, too, and the young man’s expectations of what he would find on the Mississippi were shaped in part by the stories he had heard about his uncle’s five years at the frontier post. Half a century earlier, David Hunter had likewise graduated from West Point and made the trek from his home in New Jersey to what was then the most remote and skeletal outpost of American authority in the Northwest, the newly constructed fort at the strategic confluence of the St. Peter (Minnesota) and Mississippi Rivers. Fort Snelling was built into a bluff overlooking the place where two conduits of the still-dominant fur trade connected a vast northern interior with downstream markets. There had been no railroad in 1822 to convey Uncle David to his first army post, nor any roads. It had taken him six months to reach Fort Snelling to take up his commission in the Fifth Infantry; the last two hundred miles from Prairie du Chien he walked on the ice of the frozen Mississippi River.53
The construction and garrisoning of Fort Snelling in 1820 had been intended to bolster a tenuous American presence in the region. The young republic had done its utmost to assert sovereignty over the Great Lakes region in the War of 1812, but in the remote northern interior of the land that would become Minnesota, the Union Jack continued to wave over the trading posts of the well-established North West Company. While the owners and managers of the company were mostly Scotsmen, their employees who were actively engaged in the fur trade were French-Canadians and men of mixed French and indigenous ancestry. Almost all of them were connected by ties of kinship to the natives who trapped and hunted for furs and traded with the company for guns and ammunition, woolen blankets, iron pots, and other manufactured goods. President Monroe’s 1817 ban on non-Americans trading on U.S. soil was toothless without a military presence to enforce it. Fort Snelling’s purpose had thus been to counteract the still-powerful British influence in the region and to control access to the fur trade interior by regulating the Mississippi route.54
When David Hunter arrived at Fort Snelling in 1823, there was hardly a white person in the region who was not related to the Dakotas or Ojibwes—or sometimes both—either through birth or through marriage. By the 1830s, six generations of intermarriage “had produced an intricate web of relationships, with people of mixed ancestry acting as an essential bridge between their white and Indian kin.”55 On the Upper Mississippi such intimate and material relationships mattered more than national allegiances. French remained the lingua franca of the region; English was hardly spoken. Like that of the French and British empires before it, the military power that the Americans were able to project in the region was feeble, insufficient to enforce a sovereignty whose assertion on maps was belied by a more complicated reality on the ground. Garrisoned with a few hundred troops, American might was no match for a population of tens of thousands of Indians. Largely though, it was the monopolistic fur trade—not the army—that both kept the peace and provoked conflict.56
Well into the middle of the nineteenth century, Minnesota remained aloof from the general east-to-west pressure of white settler expansion to secure Indian “removal.” White settlement was in fact antithetical to the interests of the fur trade companies. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the fur-trading monopolies, especially the North West Company, that had proved hostile—more than the region’s native inhabitants—to the few pockets of intrepid (and usually uninformed) white settlers who attempted to establish agricultural colonies in the remote and inhospitable river valleys of the North Country.57
At mid-century, even as the new states hewn out of the Northwest Territory to the east and south sought to remove Indians from within their borders, Minnesota fur-traders-turned-politicians sought to relocate more Indians in Minnesota, not to remove them from the territory. Anglo-Minnesotans lobbied Congress to receive the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) from Iowa and Wisconsin and also to have the government purchase a million acres of land from the Objibwes on which to resettle Menominees from Wisconsin. Such territorial maneuvering was motivated not by love of Indians, but rather by the desire to capture the economic benefits of the annuity payments settled on the tribes by the federal government in return for forfeiture of their claims to their ancestral lands.58 The Ojibwe, meanwhile, had their own reasons for supporting the resettlement of other tribes in Minnesota. They saw the arrival of other tribes from the east as helpful in creating a buffer zone between themselves and the Dakota.59
With the disappearance of the fur trade by mid-century and the advent of the railroad, Fort Snelling’s military focus shifted from the North to the West. Instead of controlling commerce and Indian relations along Minnesota’s waterways, the fort now functioned as a remote command center in the continuing contest over lands further west where plains tribes continued to challenge the claims of the United States to exclusive sovereignty.
Minnesota’s distinctive borderland society, so long in the making and seemingly so enduring, was quickly and violently unmade. As the fur trade entered a period of both local and global decline, Minnesota offered new rich prospects for resource extraction and agricultural development in which Indian presence on the land was seen by speculators and settlers as an obstacle to progress—and to profit—as it had been further east. Wisconsin Winnebagos who had been settled on timberland in the central part of the territory were divested of that lucrative land and relocated to the prairie in the southwestern part of the territory from where, against their will, they would later be removed again to Dakota Territory, and from there to Nebraska.60
When Congress recognized the last remaining unorganized part of the Old Northwest as the territory of Minnesota in 1849, pressures intensified on native tribes to cede most of their remaining lands to the federal government in return for payments representing a fraction of their market value. The annuity payments the Indians actually received were further diminished by the liens traders had written into the cession treaties, which guaranteed that the credit they had extended to the tribes would be paid first.
