The father, overcome by grief, said to all who would listen, “An Ojibwe warrior never throws away his tears.” He planned and plotted his revenge and two years later led a huge war party against the Dakota. The Ojibwe wiped out a number of small villages and the few Dakota survivors retreated to the main village on the big lake. The Ojibwe attacked again and instead of simply relying on the few guns they had and their bows and war clubs, they threw bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes in the Dakota lodges. Many hundreds of Dakota burned to death. The surviving Dakota gave up the lake and retreated west and south. However, it would be another 100 years before all the Dakota left northern and central Minnesota. The lake is as beautiful and rich today as it was when the lovers’ quarrel set off that chain of events.
Mille Lacs is drained by the Rum River, named by early explorers with a sense of humor but still earlier known as Wakha’ or “Spirit River.” Many people now think of the name “Rum” as a pretty bad joke. Bogus Brook, a tributary of the Rum (which eventually flows into the Mississippi), is reputed to have been a backwater hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition. Many of the tourists who come to Mille Lacs in the summer are from Chicago. It is said that Al Capone had a house on Mille Lacs, and that he also had a hideout in Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin and at Leech Lake, north of Mille Lacs. It is also said that he had an Indian mistress with whom he was very much in love; some say she was from Mille Lacs, others say she was from Lac Courte Oreilles, and still others say she was from Leech Lake. Everyone wants to claim Al Capone. The casino at Mille Lacs is called Grand Casino, and it is indeed big.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of natural resources Mille Lacs was almost a reservation that wasn’t. In 1825, when representatives from Mille Lacs signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien (along with about 1,000 other delegates from the Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Dakota, Iowa, and others), they were a force to be reckoned with. The meeting had been organized by the United States and was primarily a treaty not between it and the tribes but rather among the tribes themselves. The United States, having gained control of the area after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, no longer had to contend with the British. Now it had to deal with Indians. And at the time, Indians controlled the whole region. Trade and settlement were hampered by constant aggression between the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes along the Minnesota River, the dividing line between their territories. They fought over hunting and trapping rights—each anxious to control more resources than the other. The U.S. government was caught in the middle and feared that continued intertribal warfare would jeopardize the fur trade in the region and the trade routes through it. The United States was the supplicant; the Indian tribes were the power in place. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established an uneasy peace between the warring tribes.
Circumstances, however, changed quickly on the frontier. By 1837 the fur trade was wobbling and about to crash. Animals such as the beaver, muskrat, and otter had been trapped to near-extinction within the domain of the Ojibwe in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Ojibwe, still strong, still a powerful military force, looked east and saw more and more white settlers. They looked west and saw that the Dakota had adopted the horse, had colonized the plains, and were growing stronger. They were being squeezed, and there was nowhere the Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes region could expand their land base. Also, there were no caches of natural resources outside their control that they could bring under their control—no additional rice beds, maple groves, cranberry swamps, or untapped trapping grounds. Starvation was, for many, only a season away. The Ojibwe saw this, and when the United States wanted them to come to the treaty table again in 1837 they said yes. Chiefs from Leech Lake, Gull Lake, Swan River, St. Croix River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac de Flambeau, La Pointe, Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, Snake River, Fond du Lac, and Red Lake all traveled to the town of St. Peter in present-day Minnesota. It was an impressive array of personalities and power. Present were the chiefs Flat Mouth, Elder Brother, Young Buffalo, Rabbit, Big Cloud, Hole in the Day, Strong Ground, White Fisher, Bear’s Heart, Buffalo, Wet Mouth, Coming Home Hollering, Cut Ear, Wood Pecker, White Crow, Knee, The Dandy, White Thunder, Two Lodges Meeting, Rat’s Liver, First Day, Both Ends of the Sky, Sparrow, Bad Boy, Big Frenchman, Spunk, Little Six, Lone Man, Loons Foot, and Murdering Yell. All of them were decked out in their finest attire and sported the scalps they’d won in battle and eagle feathers notched or colored depending on how they’d killed the enemy (bludgeoned, split down the middle, or stabbed). They brought warriors with them, armed with bows, guns, scalping knives, and war clubs. They entered singing. The white representatives brought maps, whiskey, and money and started talking.
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
