This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Commissioner Rice was reassuring but vague. He told the council: “You are entitled to select for your allotments the lands called farming lands . . . we do not ask you to dispose of a foot of that. And there will be nothing done with the lands until you have your allotments.”13 At the same time, because he appreciated the extent of the local demand for Mille Lacs land, Rice did not mention the thousands of acres of tribal land already claimed by squatters. He also avoided the issue of the government’s unwillingness to remove those trespassers from Mille Lacs territory. When one leader pressed him to promise that “the whites will be removed immediately” from the reservation, the old trader retreated to the language of bureaucracy: “Your words are taken down,” he said. “We cannot answer that question as it is a matter to be referred to Washington. . . . There is only one thing for you to be done; and that is for you to keep quiet and disturb no one. Wait until you hear from the Great Father,” Rice added. “If there is anything wrong, he will correct it.”14

  Assured by these general statements and their long personal association with Rice, the assembled leaders agreed to sign an agreement that contained no specific description of the lands to be allotted at Mille Lacs. Indeed, it declared that they would “forever relinquish . . . the right of occupancy on the Mille Lacs Reservation.”15 Understanding that the reservation would be replaced with a block of individual allotments, the tribe’s leaders believed the last phrase referred to surplus communal land remaining after all individuals had been assigned homesteads. The band was cooperative, as was its custom, but it insisted on one more pledge. As Rice presented a written document for the tribal members to sign, Wahweyaycumig, a younger chief, who later described himself as one of Shobaushkung’s followers, demanded that the commissioners promise they would enforce the agreement. He asked for a personal pledge. “Let us raise our hands as a token of pure friendship,” Wahweyacumig said. The council record notes that everyone, Indians and whites alike, then stood and raised his hands, “while the Indians shouted, ‘Ho!’” 16

  The commissioners’ promise was empty. Despite the pledges of friendship, nothing was done in the aftermath of the 1889 agreement to remove white squatters from the Mille Lacs Reservation or to allot any land to the tribal members who had raised their hands with Henry Rice.17 To make matters worse, federal officials stood idly by as new intruders appeared and demanded that federal authorities ratify their illegal titles. Exploiting an obscure provision of the original Nelson Act that promised to recognize holders of “valid, pre-emption or homestead claims” when reservation lands came on the market, a small army of white settlers suddenly invaded the reservation, claiming they had been there for years. Nathan Richardson, a sympathetic local attorney in nearby Little Falls, Minnesota, reported in February 1890 that “at the present time according to the statements of these [Mille Lacs] Indians, nearly all of the lands of the reservation are claimed by squatters.”18 His statement came only three months after Commissioner Rice had pledged his good intentions.

  Despite his position as a community leader in a white town near the reservation border, Richardson could not ignore the fact that the tribe was being treated unfairly. He reported his concerns to the Indian Rights Association. “I have heard for some time that there was an association formed for the purpose of seeing that the Indians were fairly dealt by,” Richardson wrote the group’s secretary, Herbert Welsh, in early 1890. He added, “I shall be pleased to assist you in any way I can to prevent . . . a great wrong and swindle from being perpetrated upon the Indians.”19 Richardson recalled that he had been present when Henry Rice assured the Mille Lacs chiefs that “if they chose to they could remain upon their reservation,” and he had heard the commissioner urge the Indians to remain peaceful. “They have therefore been quiet and allowed the squatters to come and build shanties all over the reservation. Nearly every Indian garden has a shanty put up in it,” he added, but the Indians continued to “rely on the promises made to them and submit to the indignities heaped upon them . . . believing that the government will deal justly with them and fulfill all the promises made to them.”20

  The IRA’s Welsh forwarded Richardson’s report to the Indian Office, but no action was taken. As had been the case in Georgia and Indian Territory earlier in the century, trespassing settlers were creating “facts on the ground” that their political representatives were loath to contradict. As in Georgia, the squatters at Mille Lacs stayed. After a year of lobbying by Minnesota’s congressional delegation and the timber interests that supported them, Secretary of the Interior John Noble ruled that the territory reserved for the Mille Lacs Ojibwes in 1855 had ceased to be a reservation in 1863 despite that treaty’s pledge that the band would not be displaced so long as it avoided conflicts with local whites. The 1863 treaty pledge only created an “interest, or easement or privilege” within the former reservation, Noble wrote, not a formal land title. He added that the band’s “interest” in its homeland could now be set aside because the department had been “assured by the chairman of [the Chippewa] commission (Henry Rice) of the Indians’ consent to remove from these lands to White Earth.”21

  Noble’s decision injected new energy into the effort to move the Mille Lacs band to White Earth. Relying on his private reading of the 1863 treaty language and Henry Rice’s bogus report that the band was willing to relocate, Noble concluded that the band had no more than an “interest” in their lakeside homeland. The secretary also seemed to share Rice’s baseless predictions. “Renewed efforts were made for the removal of the Indians,” the commissioner declared, “with gratifying results.” During the year following the commission’s visit, the local land office validated thousands of acres of squatters’ claims.22 By October 1891 another visiting member of the Chippewa Commission declared that the band’s leaders had no alternative but to leave. “I told them they must go to White Earth,” Darwin Hall reported. “I told them it was very doubtful about their receiving any more payments where they now are, at Mille Lacs.” Hall urged the Mille Lacs people to leave, but at least he was honest enough to recognize the injustice in his demand. After studying the transcript of Rice’s 1889 council with the tribe, he reported to his superiors: “These Indians were made promises which it is impossible for us to fulfill.”23

  This increasingly energetic campaign for Mille Lacs removal had little effect on the band. About one hundred tribal members agreed to leave for White Earth in 1891, but a large number of that group later returned home to resume their annual round of farming and gathering. When a new administration took office in Washington in 1893, the Mille Lacs leaders petitioned the Democratic president to take action where his Republican predecessor had not. Writing in October 1894, Waweacomsek and eleven other leaders (including Shobaushkung’s son Meegeesee) urged Grover Cleveland to ignore the “strangers who are here for the purpose of dispossessing us. As we have never consented to give up our lands,” the leaders declared, “we believe our right to them is paramount to that of any other person or persons.” Assisted, perhaps, by their local ally Nathan Richardson, the group also proposed placing the issue before “a court of competent jurisdiction” and requested that annuity payments again be made at Mille Lacs. A recent government order requiring the Mille Lacs to travel to White Earth to receive the annuities owed them, they declared, was “outrageously wrong and unworthy of a civilized government.”24

  Within months of submitting their petition, it was clear to Waweacomsek and his colleagues that Democrats were no more interested in challenging white squatters than Republicans had been. Despite Richardson’s encouragement and the sympathy of the IRA, they had not been able to win a hearing for their complaints. The Indian Office seemed prepared to ignore them until they accepted their fate and relocated to White Earth. At this point, exactly five years after their encounter with Henry Rice and the Chippewa Commission, the chiefs at Mille Lacs decided to take their fight to the American capital.

  LOBBYING IN WASHINGTON, D.C.


  As they considered how best to proceed, Shobaushkung and his colleagues recruited a new ally, Gustave H. Beaulieu. Gus Beaulieu was the grandson of Bazil Hudon dit Beaulieu, a North West Fur Company trader who had come to Lake Superior in the first decade of the nineteenth century and married into an Ojibwe family. Bazil’s son Clement had also become a trader and had married an Ojibwe woman. Clement managed trading posts in Wisconsin and Minnesota and served frequently as an official translator at treaty councils. He had accompanied the Chippewa Commission to Mille Lacs in 1889.

  Most Ojibwes had mixed feelings about the Beaulieus. Bazil and Clement had been important middlemen and advisers for both Indians and whites, but they were also commercially ambitious and frequently self-serving. Ojibwe leaders were also unsure of Gus. This third-generation Beaulieu had worked as a timber agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s, helping the company acquire valuable real estate, and he had been an early settler at White Earth, operating a number of small businesses and a short-lived newspaper, the Progress. He eventually found work with the federal government, serving as a translator and clerk at the U.S. marshal’s office and the office of the U.S. attorney. Familiar with the law but with no standing before the bar, Gus approached the beleaguered Mille Lacs leaders in 1895 and offered to represent them as their attorney. With few other prospects, the chiefs readily accepted.

  In March 1895 Beaulieu prepared a new petition for the Interior Department that he hoped might spark formal negotiations with the authorities. Beaulieu’s letter was a curious document. It repeated the Indians’ charge that they had suffered “inhuman” treatment and declared “there is not a band of Indians . . . that is entitled to more consideration,” but he also hinted that it still might be possible to move the group to White Earth. In fact, Beaulieu told the secretary of the interior that his father, Clement, had advised Henry Rice to use diplomacy with the band. He was sure persuasion and sympathy would produce results. “I know the nature of the Indians too well to believe that coercive measures will secure their removal to White Earth,” Beaulieu wrote. “Conciliatory means alone should be used to secure this.”25

  While their attorney fished for a response from the Interior Department bureaucracy, his clients in central Minnesota restated their determination to stay. Three months after Beaulieu’s letter, a group of chiefs, headed by Wahweyaycumig, who now described himself as Shobaushkung’s successor, met with Nathan Richardson and asked him to forward a new petition to President Cleveland. In addition to asking for a return to the practice of disbursing annuities at Mille Lacs, the chiefs implored U.S. officials “to remove from among us the pale faces that are trying to take from us our lands” and “to give us what you in a most solemn manner promised us.”26

  The band maintained this two-pronged approach for most of the 1890s. Beaulieu sought a negotiated solution with officials in the Indian Office while the chiefs at Mille Lacs insisted that the federal government live up to its past commitments. They repeated this position in 1896, when the General Land Office announced that 4,833 acres of land within the reservation remained “unclaimed.” Tribal leaders immediately demanded that these parcels be allotted to them.27 Citing Secretary Noble’s previous assertion that the band’s reservation no longer existed, the Interior Department refused, and the stalemate continued.

  When the McKinley administration took office in 1897, Gus Beaulieu, Wahweyaycumig, and Meegeesee traveled to Washington, D.C., to present their case to the new leadership of the Indian Office. “One of the objects of their visit,” the local Princeton Union reported, “is to find out what right the white men have to go on their reservation.”28 The Mille Lacs lobbyists were facing an increasingly hostile political environment. The American settlers at Mille Lacs and their political allies across Minnesota were now offering their own version of recent events. They rejected the band’s reliance on past treaties, substituting instead a rationale based on the language of race. Indians who insisted on staying at Mille Lacs were backward people, they argued, too ignorant to take advantage of the promising opportunities provided at White Earth. They were simply “old bucks” wishing to live out their days in the woods. This image of recalcitrant, ignorant Indians unwilling to embrace the government’s progressive programs fitted neatly with the view of McKinley’s commissioner of Indian affairs, a small-town Republican operative from Wisconsin named William Jones, who decreed that the Mille Lacs families would be better off at White Earth, “where good lands are available for them and where they can better receive the care of the Government. Past experience demonstrates,” Jones wrote, “that as long as the occupancy of the Mille Lacs lands is in dispute . . . the Indians will be slow to remove to the White Earth reservation where their condition could be greatly improved.”29

  This logic of removal took legal form in May 1898, when Congress passed a joint resolution that declared “all public lands” within the Mille Lacs Reservation to be “subject to entry by any bona fide qualified settler” and proclaimed that all previous homestead or preemption claims “shall be received and treated in all respects as if made upon any of the public lands of the United States.”30 The resolution had been proposed by the Duluth congressman Page Morris and supported by other members of the state’s congressional delegation. Gus Beaulieu reported to the Interior Department that Chief Wahweyaycumig and other band leaders opposed Morris’s bill, but Secretary Cornelius Bliss countered that the band had “parted with all their rights to the lands in this reservation” when it reached an agreement with Henry Rice and his commission in 1889. The protesting Indians were simply opponents of progress. Bliss did not mention the 1863 treaty or the promises made during the Chippewa Commission negotiations or the tribe’s decade-long campaign to acquire allotments at Mille Lacs. With breathtaking duplicity the secretary noted that families at Mille Lacs “might have” claimed allotments there in 1889 but that their opportunity had passed. He continued, “[I]t is not apparent why the equities of settlers who have gone upon these lands . . . and made valuable improvements on them should not be recognized.”31

  Remarkably, the 1898 congressional resolution had no more effect on the band’s determination to remain at Mille Lacs than any of the government’s previous actions. The Indians refused to leave, and their “attorney,” Gus Beaulieu, continued to look for a deal. He suggested that cash would persuade band members to leave their homes. In 1900 Beaulieu, now joined by the Washington claims attorney Daniel Henderson, convinced Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson that an appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars would be enough to compensate the group for its losses and prompt it to decamp for White Earth. Nelson introduced his bill, but the Mille Lacs chiefs rejected it out of hand. A council meeting on the reservation instead approved a resolution condemning the white settlers who had “confiscated” their property and adding that they would “not accept or consider” any proposal that required their removal.32

  Thus far during the Mille Lacs band’s struggle the population of white settlers on the reservation had been sufficiently small that there had been few face-to-face conflicts between the Indians and their encroaching neighbors. Ojibwe families had maintained their traditional gathering traditions and had continued hunting, trapping, and gardening along the southern and western shores of Mille Lacs Lake. As the white population increased during the 1890s, several band members had also found occasional employment from local whites as day laborers and domestics. Despite more than a decade of legal and political wrangling, it appeared that Indians and whites were coexisting peacefully. A visiting government agent described the community in 1902 as “self supporting and well dressed.” He noted as well that “their white neighbors speak very highly of them and say that they obtain credit readily from the neighboring merchants.” Tribal members “meet their obligations with as much promptness as the white people in the community.” 33

  In the new century, however, the press of white settlement began to move the tw
o communities toward confrontation. Settlers and local landowners complained that Mille Lacs families were trespassing on their property, while Indians protested that the settlers’ (who they insisted were squatters) were now interfering with their hunting, gardening, and gathering activities. The most visible conflict occurred on land claimed by Chief Shobaushkung’s son Meegeesee at a site that encompassed his father’s former lakeside village. Meegeesee had attempted to file a homestead entry on several lots adjacent to his father’s previously recognized plot of land near Shobaushkung Point in 1891 but had been turned away by the local land office.

  At the end of the decade a white settler, Olof Johnson, filed a homestead claim at Shobaushkung Point and initiated proceedings to evict Meegeesee for trespassing. When Meegeesee challenged the action, Johnson claimed his title had been guaranteed by the 1898 resolution confirming all homestead entries on the reservation. The chief and his supporters continued to protest Johnson’s presence, and the case was forwarded to the secretary of the interior. In July 1900, just as the Nelson proposal to pay the Mille Lacs band twenty-five thousand dollars to remove to White Earth was scheduled for congressional approval, the Interior Department decided the case in Meegeesee’s favor. Secretary Ethan Hitchcock ruled that Meegeesee and his family had lived on the land long before Johnson had arrived and that the chief “was driven from the land by the threats of the defendant, accompanied by a display of fire arms, followed by his arrest. . . .” Meegeesee had only been released, the secretary added, “upon his promise not to return to the land, except to gather his growing crop.”34