Part 5: Henry Sibley's role

By John Biewen

A leading negotiator for the whites during these treaty deals was a man named Henry Sibley. Nobody was more important in the creation of the state of Minnesota. He'd later become its first governor.

"The treaty couldn't have happened without Henry Sibley," according to historian Mary Wingerd. She wrote a book called "North Country: The Making of Minnesota," which is considered the definitive history of Minnesota up to and including the U.S.-Dakota War.

Henry Sibley moved in from Detroit in the 1830s, when he was just 23, as an employee of The American Fur Company. He had a big job -- to oversee the southern half of what's now Minnesota.

Sibley had a child with a Dakota woman. He understood the Dakota language. He went before Congress, harshly criticizing treaties that "betrayed and deceived" Indians.

"As a young man, he just relished spending time with the Dakota, and he would go out and hunt with them, and really fostered good relations with them," said Wingerd. "But the fur trade was economically a dying business when he came here."

By the 1830s and '40s, the region had been over-hunted. Revenues were down, and everyone -- from managers like Sibley to local traders on the frontier, down to the Dakota men who did the actual hunting -- was in debt to the fur company who had advanced them money for all the supplies, traps and guns.

"Even though [Sibley] may seem to be a big man in Minnesota, he is buried in debt," said Wingerd. "By 1849, he was really looking around for some other way to make a living, but he couldn't get out of the trade until he could pay his debts. Because of his financial difficulties, he really played the Dakota people false."

Sibley wrote to Pierre Chouteau, who held most of Sibley's debt, and he boasted to him:

The Indians are all prepared to make a treaty when we tell them to do so, and such a one as I may dictate. I think I may safely promise you that no treaty can be made without our claims being first secured.

Sibley and Chouteau said the Dakota owed them a lot of money -- those are the "claims" he's talking about -- and they saw the treaties as a way to get paid.

DECEPTIVE TREATY TACTICS

The way it happened was ugly. The treaty signed at Traverse des Sioux in 1851 was one example.

The treaty was translated into the Dakota language for the chiefs to discuss, but their copy left out a key fact: The U.S. government wasn't going to give the Dakota their payment in a lump sum, as the Dakota wanted and expected.

"When [Sibley] is faced with a moral dilemma ... he chooses his own self interest."

Instead, the money would stay in the hands of the government and would be doled out in much smaller annual payments -- not just in gold, but also in food and supplies like farming equipment.

The treaty did provide $305,000 in cash right away, so 15,000 Dakota people could get through their first winter on the reservation, and "settle their affairs."

After the signing of the treaty, Sibley's allies took the chiefs aside to sign a second document. The chiefs later said they thought it was just another copy of the treaty. But in fact, they were agreeing to hand over most of that $305,000 to the traders -- all but $60,000 -- to settle their debts. So the traders got their money.

Sibley himself walked away with $66,000 -- more than the Dakota people got in the initial cash payment.

"That cleared his debts. That allowed him to get out of the trade," said Wingerd. "It was probably the best day of his life."

"[Sibley] has to know what he's doing. When he is faced with a moral dilemma - dealing fairly with these people who have been [his] friends, or taking advantage of this opportunity to get out of this situation that [he hates], he chooses his own self interest," she said.

Part 6: The buildup to war >>>

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