THE MILLE LACS OJIBWES GO TO COURT
The Mille Lacs band’s petition to the Court of Claims did not originate in central Minnesota, but in Washington, D.C., where two non-Indian actors—Daniel Henderson and Duluth congressman James Bede, linked by the shady presence of Gus Beaulieu—started the process. When they entered the court in 1909, the Mille Lacs band transferred the question of what Henry Rice had promised in 1889 from the political arena, where legislators, lobbyists, and Indian Office bureaucrats made the rules, to the legal world, where judges operated according to established procedures and precedents. Despite its distance from their Minnesota homeland, then, this new forum vastly enhanced the visibility of the Mille Lacs struggle. It would also enable the band’s leaders to air their complaints in an institution charged with delivering justice to those who appeared before it. With conditions at home deteriorating and members drifting away to White Earth, imperfect justice in court would have been preferable to the indifference and hostility they had experienced elsewhere.
Henderson drafted a jurisdictional bill on behalf of the Mille Lacs band, which Congressman Bede filed in March 1906. No action was taken on the proposal until February 1908, when Senator Clapp’s committee approved it and moved it to the Senate floor. It received final approval on February 15, 1909. The new statute, an Act for the Relief of the Mille Lac Band of Chippewa Indians, authorized the court “to hear and determine a suit or suits to be brought . . . on account of losses sustained . . . by reason of the opening of the Mille Lac Reservation. . . .” Barely ninety days following passage of the act, the band’s attorneys filed a complaint that sought three million dollars in compensation for the government’s negligence.54
An obscure sentence within the new law revealed its Washington pedigree. Unlike the 1902 bill, which had recognized the Mille Lacs band’s authority over the allocation of the money Congress appropriated for its relief, the 1909 statute instructed the Court of Claims to determine the attorneys’ fees that might ultimately be paid from the funds “due said band or to the Chippewa Indians of Minnesota.” The Mille Lacs chiefs were not consulted about the fees their lawyers would collect, and they certainly would have objected to the statute’s vague language regarding the recipients of the financial award requested (“said band or to the Chippewa Indians of Minnesota”). Those provisions of the bill reflected an energetic lobbying campaign that had taken place behind the scenes while Bede’s proposal worked its way through the House and Senate.
Work on the Mille Lacs jurisdictional act began in 1905, immediately following Gus Beaulieu’s failure to purchase land as discussed with James McLaughlin. Furious with their “attorney,” the chiefs declared that he was no longer authorized to represent them. Meegeesee and the other chiefs remaining at Mille Lacs also charged that Beaulieu had persuaded Wahweyaycumig and his family to accept an allotment at White Earth with the promise that the government agent at the reservation would recognize him as the headman of all his neighbors who agreed to relocate.55 Despite the band chiefs’ disapproval of their efforts, Beaulieu and Henderson had begun petitioning Congressman Bede to file a jurisdictional bill to recognize the tribe’s mistreatment and provide a final settlement for the dispute. Chauncey Richardson, a Washington attorney who had represented White Earth Indians in separate proceedings, later reported that following the filing of Bede’s bill, he had corresponded with Beaulieu and Daniel Henderson and accompanied Wahweyaycumig and two other “removed” Mille Lacs leaders when they testified before a House Indian Affairs panel in early 1908. (Beaulieu was also present, serving as translator.)56
As Bede’s bill moved toward passage, Richardson also served as an emissary from Beaulieu to the Indian Office and proposed himself as one of the lawyers who would represent the Indians once the matter reached the Court of Claims. George B. Edgerton, the son of a former U.S. senator, a former Minnesota assistant attorney general, and a partner in the St. Paul law firm of Edgerton, Wickwire, and Rice, also joined the case.57 Beaulieu, who referred to Edgerton at one point as “my lawyer,” noted in 1908, as the jurisdictional bill moved toward passage, that he had conferred with Edgerton and drawn up an agreement with him respecting the Mille Lacs matter.58
A few weeks after finalizing his agreement with his very well-connected attorney, Beaulieu served as secretary and interpreter at a meeting of the Mille Lacs Indians who had resettled at White Earth. With Wahweyaycumig presiding, council members approved a resolution on December 15 authorizing George Selkirk to represent them in Congress and the courts for ten years. They promised Selkirk 15 percent of whatever “may be awarded, allowed, secured, invested or appropriated” as a result. Five weeks later, on January 23, 1909, a similar council convened at Mille Lacs. Beaulieu again served as interpreter. The council assented to the resolutions passed at White Earth. Two weeks after the second council meeting and one week before the final enactment of the Mille Lacs jurisdictional act George Selkirk signed over his rights as tribal attorney to George B. Edgerton.59 The proposed statute did not contain the usual provision requiring tribal attorneys to submit their contracts to the Indian Office for prior approval. But the secretary of the interior forwarded the final legislation to the White House on February 15 nonetheless. He assured the president that he did not consider the missing provision “failure . . . as sufficient cause for the veto of the Act.” 60
The complaint filed by the Mille Lacs band on May 29, 1909, was signed by Edgerton and Chauncey Richardson, the latter listed as “of counsel.” Despite its establishment origins and dubious provisions, the petition finally brought the Ojibwes’ twenty-year struggle into a prominent public forum. The band’s statement declared that all but 160 acres of the 62,000-acre Mille Lacs Reservation had been “wrongfully and unlawfully opened to public settlement and entry” and requested three million dollars as compensation. Edgerton quickly began collecting depositions and assembling documents. He and his team, which grew to include the Milwaukee appeals attorney Frederick Houghton and Harvey Clapp, the son of the Minnesota senator who chaired the Indian Affairs Committee, also quickly prepared briefs to support their case. Houghton and Edgerton appeared before the court on behalf of the band when the case was argued in March 1911.61
The Mille Lacs leadership supported the suit despite the many compromises that had been made on the road to court. Beaulieu was untrustworthy, the band was divided, and the list of lawyers demanding compensation was growing steadily, but the chiefs were eager to be heard. All the major band leaders at both White Earth and Mille Lacs gave extensive depositions to document their complaints. Their testimony vividly underscored the extent of injustice that had been perpetrated against them. It created a solid archive of evidence that could not be disputed or denied.
The process of taking depositions began in July 1909 and continued well into the fall. The aging Mille Lacs headmen made compelling witnesses. Meegeesee, Wahweyaycumig, and others repeated the history of their band with consistency and the power of first-person narration. Many individuals described Henry Rice’s 1889 pledge, and several pointed out the various deceitful tactics local settlers and government agents had used to prod them to leave their homes. But none was more eloquent than Naygwonabe, an elder who had not been prominent in earlier negotiations but who provided a compelling example of how Ojibwe people viewed the controversy over their land. Naygwonabe testified before the lawyers Edgerton, Clapp, and Henderson at Mille Lacs on August 4. He declared that he was ninety years old and lived “way off somewhere about the lake.”
“Is your residence on the Mille Lac Reservation?” the lawyers asked.
“No, they drove me off where I used to live. . . .”
“How are you interested in this claim?”
“Because I was brought [up] and had my being from this lake; from this place.”
Naygwonabe recounted how he had moved away to White Earth, as the government demanded, but that he had quickly sold his allotment there
and returned home to Mille Lacs. When he returned, a white man was living on the land he had previously occupied.
“Did you know how he got it?” the lawyers asked.
“I asked him ‘How do you come to own this land?’ He says ‘The big chief told me to come here and own the land.’ . . . I told him ‘I own this land because my old ancestors have owned this land and planted their gardens there.’ And he asked me, ‘Who gave it to you?’ . . . I say ‘The Great Spirit who owns us all gave me this land. That is why I am here.’ And then he didn’t say any more.”62
The claims case encouraged the band’s dispirited leaders to keep up the fight for their homeland. The Minnesota Chippewa commissioner Darwin Hall, for example, reported to his superiors just as the depositions were getting under way that the Indians believed the court would grant them “millions of dollars” and this prospect was “exciting them and making them less easy to control.” Attorney Richardson confirmed this view a few weeks later, when he submitted a request on behalf of Waweyaycumig, the removed Mille Lacs chief at White Earth, who was now his client. Richardson reported that the old man demanded that all future allotments issued to members of his band at White Earth be concentrated near his allotment. Concentrated together near Wahweyaycumig at Elbow Lake, Richardson noted, they could fish and hunt as a group. He added that the band was “gregarious . . . intermarried . . . fond of each other, and have been fellow sufferers at the hands of the whites. . . .” The Indian Office rejected the request swiftly and firmly. The purpose of removal was individual landownership, the exasperated chief clerk wrote from his Washington office. The program was aimed at achieving “progress” and “uplift,” not communal hunting. “The present policy is for segregation, not colonization,” he added. “The consolidation of Indians in villages would be a return to tribal practices.”63
Events over the next two years made it clear that neither the legal formalities surrounding the claims case nor the fact that the court’s decision would be limited to money damages had quieted white opposition to the band’s continued presence at Mille Lacs. While local residents continued to press for the band’s removal, the Ojibwe families that remained at the lake were as determined as ever to stay. Congressman Bede reported to the Indian Office in 1908 that his constituents were “complaining about the conduct of the many Indians who are still living there. . . . Is it not possible,” the congressman inquired, “to have these Indians sent to the reservation in the near future?”
The commissioner’s office reminded Bede that every Indian who accepted an allotment became a U.S. citizen and was therefore “as free to come and go as they please the same as any citizen.”64 Hundreds of Ojibwe families exercised this right, occupying gardens, cultivating rice beds, and hunting grounds near the lake while pursuing their traditional subsistence activities. Families moved between the few spots where their title was secure and remote forested areas that remained unclaimed or unoccupied. Darwin Hall described the situation as it stood in the fall of 1910. “The land all around Mille Lacs Lake is owned by private individuals and is becoming valuable,” he reported. “If the Indians have any rights I am here to protect them, but they will be ejected from the land as the whites need it.”65
A few weeks after Darwin Hall made this prediction the Mille Lacs Investment and Improvement Company purchased land at Monzomaunay Point on Mille Lacs Lake, a site occupied by an extended family headed by Chief Monzomaunay’s son Wadena. Wadena’s father had been one of the band leaders who had met with the Chippewa Commission in 1889 and later traveled to nearby Little Falls to seek the help of Nathan Richardson. His family had lived on the land for the last several decades. Eager to develop their lakefront real estate for vacation homes, the Mille Lacs Investment and Improvement Company immediately initiated eviction proceedings in county court. Its complaint charged Wadena and his kinsmen with “wrongfully withholding” the company’s property. Wadena and his codefendants answered the charges with the assistance of two Duluth attorneys. Noting that they and their families had peacefully occupied Monzomaunay Point “by authority grant and acquiescence of the United States Government” for more than thirty years, they added what had become a familiar statement: “[N]one of said defendants have ever surrendered their rights to said lands or any portion thereof.” Wadena and his family did not appear in nearby Princeton on April 5, 1911, when the dispute was aired in open court. As a consequence, the judge ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, and a week later he ordered the local sheriff to remove Wadena from Monzomaunay Point.66
In early May, Sheriff Harry Shockley, a dozen deputies, and two wagons gathered at Mille Lacs to enforce the judge’s order. The police detachment arrived early in the day, handcuffed Wadena, and, over his protests, removed forty people, described in the local press as “bucks and their squaws and families,” from their village.67 Some observers reported that the sheriff poured gasoline over the band’s wigwams and cabins and set them ablaze after the group departed.68 Similar conflicts had occurred elsewhere on the reservation, but the Ojibwe defendants usually just retreated to unoccupied spots along the lake and resumed their round of hunting, gardening, and gathering. Wadena was no exception. At the end of the news story describing his eviction, the local Princeton Union reporter noted that once the chief had left his homestead on the point, his manacles were removed, and he and his followers “moved silently down the trail until they found another tract of land which suited their fancy. There they settled down and will remain until such time as the paleface owner again drives them forth.”69
Just weeks after his dramatic eviction from Monzomaunay Point, Chief Wadena and his fellow Mille Lacs Ojibwes learned that they had won a stunning victory in the Court of Claims. In its May 29 decision, the court did not mention the chief’s recent difficulties, but it did praise the Ojibwe leaders’ insistence on the right of their community to occupy their reservation under the provisions of the 1863 treaty. According to Judge Fenton Booth, that agreement “confirmed rather than extinguished their rights. . . . Their complete understanding of the treaty,” he declared, “is manifested not only by their words spoken at council meetings, but by the dogged persistence with which they retained their residence on the Mille Lacs Reservation under the most discouraging circumstances. . . .” Nearly a century after James McDonald asserted that treaties conveyed rights to Indians that the nation’s own values compelled the government to honor, the Court of Claims affirmed that the Mille Lacs leadership had been correct all along.70
Echoing the statements that Chiefs Shobaushkung and Monzomaunay had made to presidents and treaty commissioners nearly fifty years earlier, the Court of Claims declared that “the very term ‘treaty’ contemplates a series of mutual concessions and reservations to define explicitly the rights of the contracting parties.” Indian treaties, the court added, “were no exception to the rule.” The court concluded that despite repeated demands that they abandon their territory, the Ojibwes at Mille Lacs “remained as a band in open, notorious possession of the same, a lawful notice to the world of a claim of title. . . .” Judge Booth dismissed the government’s argument that the group’s title was somehow compromised by the encroachments of settlers and the neglect of Indian Office officials. Federal promises could not be eroded so easily. Calling the government’s argument “repugnant,” Booth added that minimizing the Indians’ title “cannot be claimed as just,” for it would undermine the goal of promoting “that permanent repose continually sought for in Indian treaties and acts of Congress.” The court determined that an award of slightly more than $764,000 would bring about some measure of “permanent repose” for the tribe.71
Back in Mille Lacs County, the June 1, 1911, edition of the Princeton Union announced “Reds Get Large Reward,” but of course Monzomaunay, Shobaushkung, Meegeesee, Wadena, and the other chiefs had never made cash their principal goal. Their objective remained protecting their lakeside homeland and winning recognition for their rights under th
e treaties of 1855 and 1863. Nevertheless, whatever hopes they may have had for new resources to support land acquisition at Mille Lacs were dashed when the court (acting under the provisions of Congressman Bede’s original jurisdictional act) ordered that the government’s compensation payments be paid directly to the general Minnesota Chippewa fund. This fund, created by Congress in 1889 to receive timber and land payments and administered by the Indian Office, would be completely beyond the reach of the community’s leaders. In 1916, after two separate appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and years of haggling among the band’s attorneys over the size of their fees, the United States paid approximately $585,000 to the fund as compensation for the loss of the Mille Lacs’ land and resources.72
The court’s decision endorsed the Mille Lacs leaders’ moral claims to their land and ratified both their legal arguments and their version of history. Fenton Booth and his colleagues on the Court of Claims affirmed that U.S. officials had failed to allot the Indians as Henry Rice had promised in 1889 and that Indian Office neglect and incompetence had enabled settlers to invade the reservation and deprive the Ojibwes of their land and resources. The Mille Lacs case had benefited from powerful legal and political advocates who, despite their obvious self-interest, forced an American court to hear and affirm the views of a tiny group of Indian leaders. In its deliberations, the Claims Court itself had enunciated an array of important principles: treaties created federal obligations to tribes, land tenure could not be dismissed at the whim of the Indian Office, and arbitrary actions by government officials could be reviewed if they were “repugnant.”
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