The world over, white men, representing a higher type of civilization,
have wrested, or are still wresting, the land from the original savage
occupants. This seems to be inevitable. It is one of the means by which
civilization is being extended over the entire globe. We glory in the
progress of civilization; but we are apt to ignore the hardship which
this brings to the aborigines. While not relaxing our endeavor to plant
the world with progressive men who shall make the most of life, we
should see to it that the savage races are pushed to the wall with as
kindly and forbearing a hand as possible; that we apply to them humane
methods, and give them credit for possessing the sentiments of men who,
like us, dearly love their old homes, and are willing to fight for them.
These sentiments have certainly not often been applied in the past, by
our Anglo-Saxon race, to the Indians of North America.
We have failed to appreciate that the Indian, in being driven from his
lands, has retaliated from motives of patriotism. His methods of
fighting are often cruel and treacherous; but it must be remembered that
he is in a stage of development akin to that of the child, and that
white men upon the frontier have often been quite as cruel and
treacherous toward the Indian as he was toward them, for such are ever
the methods of the weak and the primitive. The Indian is blamed for his
custom of wreaking vengeance upon all white men, when but an individual
has injured him; yet, on the border, it has always been seen that white
men have retaliated on the Indians in exactly the same spirit. "The only
good Indian is a dead Indian," has been their motto, the offense of one
Indian being considered the offense of all. Our dealings with the red
men, both as individuals and as a nation, have, for over a hundred
years, often been such as we should blush for. We are doing better now
than formerly; but our treatment of the weak and unfortunate aborigines
is still far from being to our credit.
The story of the Winnebago War, in Wisconsin, is illustrative of the
old-time method of treating our barbaric predecessors. No doubt it would
have been better if the United States had, from the first, held all the
Indians to be subjects, and forced them to obey our laws. But the tribes
were considered in theory to be distinct nations, over whom we exercised
supervision, and with whom we held treaties. This at first seemed
necessary, owing to the patriarchal system among the Indians, by which
heads of families or clans are supposed to control the younger members,
all affairs being decided upon in councils, in which these wise old men
participate. It was thought that, through the chiefs, binding agreements
could be made with entire tribes. It was not then generally understood
that each Indian is, according to the customs of those people, really a
law unto himself; that the chiefs, in signing a treaty, are seldom
representative in the sense that we use the word, and that they
generally represent no one but themselves; that the only way in which
they can commit their tribes is through the respect or fear which they
may foster in the minds of their followers.
In the month of August, 1825, when Wisconsin was still a part of
Michigan Territory, there was a treaty signed at Prairie du Chien
between the United States and the Indians of what are now Illinois,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The treaty set boundaries between the
quarrelsome tribes, and agreed on a general peace upon the border. Like
most Indian treaties, this document was drawn up by the officers of the
general government; and the chiefs, knowing little of its contents, were
simply invited to sign their names to it. They signed as requested, but
went home in bad temper, because the American commissioners would not
make them costly presents of guns, ammunition, beads, hatchets, cloths,
and rum, as the British in Canada always did; and the savages were not
even allowed to celebrate the treaty by a roistering feast. The
Americans, from their cold, businesslike conduct, impressed the Indians
as being "stingy old women."
Nobody on the frontier, the following winter, seemed to pay the
slightest attention to the terms of the treaty. The Sioux, who lived
west of the Mississippi, the Winnebagoes in southern and western
Wisconsin, and the Chippewas in the north, quarreled with one another
and scalped one another as freely as ever; while French traders, in
British employ, stirred up the red men, and told them that Great Britain
would soon have the whole country back again. The Winnebagoes, in
particular, were irritated because two of their braves had been
imprisoned for thieving, at Fort Crawford, in Prairie du Chien. They
held numerous councils in the woods, and resolved to stand by the
British when the war should break out. In the midst of this uneasiness,
the troops at Fort Crawford were suddenly withdrawn to Fort Snelling, on
the Upper Mississippi River, near where St. Paul now is. This was
supposed by the Indians to mean that the American soldiers were afraid
of them.
The spring of 1827 arrived. A half-breed named Methode was making maple
sugar upon the Yellow River, in Iowa, a dozen miles north of Prairie du
Chien. With him were his wife and five children; all were set upon by
some Winnebagoes and killed, scalped, and burned. Naturally there was an
uproar all along the Upper Mississippi. Excitement was at its height,
when word was brought in by Sioux visitors to the village of Red Bird, a
petty Winnebago chief, that the two men of his tribe who had been
imprisoned in Fort Crawford had been hung when the troops reached Fort
Snelling. The wily Sioux suggested vengeance. The Winnebago code was two
lives for one. Inflamed with rage, Red Bird set out at once upon the
warpath to take four white scalps.
Meanwhile the clouds were gathering for a general storm. The American
Indian agent at Prairie du Chien, with singular indiscretion, was not
treating his Winnebago visitors with kindness. English and French fur
traders were, on behalf of Great Britain, making liberal promises for
the future. Winnebagoes were being brutally driven from the lead mines
by the white miners, who were now swarming into southwest Wisconsin. The
Sioux along the west bank of the Mississippi, in Minnesota, were
encouraging the Winnebagoes to revolt; and were displaying a bad temper
toward Americans, whom they thought cowardly because apparently
unwilling to use military force to keep the Indians in order.
One day in June, Red Bird, a friend named Wekau, and two other
Winnebagoes, appeared at the door of a log cabin owned by Registre
Gagnier, a French settler living on the edge of Prairie du Chien
village. Gagnier was an old friend of Red Bird, and invited the four
Indians in to take dinner with him and his family. For several hours the
guests stayed, eating and smoking in apparent good humor, until at last
their chance came. Gagnier and his serving man, Lipcap, were instantly
shot down; an infant of eighteen months was torn from the arms of Madame
Gagnier, stabbed and scalped before her eyes, and thrown to the floor as
dead; but the woman herself with her little boy, ten years of age,
escaped to the woods and gave the alarm to the neighbors. The Indians
slunk into the forest and disappeared. The villagers buried Gagnier and
Lipcap, and, finding the infant girl alive, restored her to her mother.
Curiously enough, the scalped child recovered and grew to robust
womanhood.
According to the Winnebago code, four white scalps must be taken in
return for the two Indians supposed to have been killed at Fort
Snelling. Red Bird had now secured three, those of Gagnier, Lipcap, and
the infant; a fourth was necessary before he could properly return to
his people in the capacity of an avenger, the proudest title which an
Indian can bear. How he obtained these scalps was, to the mind of his
race, unimportant; the one idea was to get them.
On the afternoon of the third day after the massacre, Red Bird and his
friends were visiting at a camp of their people, near the mouth of the
Bad Ax River, some forty miles north of Prairie du Chien. A drunken
feast was in progress, in honor of the scalp taking, when two keel boats
appeared on their way down the Mississippi from Fort Snelling to St.
Louis. The Sioux, at what is now Winona, had threatened the crews, but
had not attempted to harm them. The Winnebagoes now appeared on the bank
and raised the war whoop, but the crew of the foremost boat thought it
only bluster, so in a spirit of bravado ran their craft toward shore.
When it was within thirty yards of the bank, the Indians, led by Red
Bird, poured a volley of rifle balls into the boat. The crew were well
armed, and, rushing below, answered by shooting through the portholes.
The boat ran on a bar, and a sharp fire lasted through three hours,
until dusk, when the craft was finally worked off the bar, and dropped
downstream in the dark. Although seven hundred bullets penetrated the
hull, only two of the crew were killed outright, two others dying later
from wounds, and two others were slightly wounded. The Indians lost
seven killed and fourteen wounded.
The "battle of the keel boats" was the signal for military activity. In
July a battalion of troops from Fort Snelling came down to Prairie du
Chien; and a little later a full regiment from St. Louis followed.
General Henry Atkinson was in command, and early in August he ordered
Major William Whistler, then in charge of Fort Howard, to proceed up Fox
River with a company of troops, in search of the fugitives Red Bird and
Wekau. At a council held with the Winnebagoes, at Butte des Morts, the
chiefs were notified that nothing short of the surrender of the leaders
of the disturbance would satisfy the government for the attack on the
boats; were they not delivered up, the entire tribe should be hunted
like wild animals.
Great consternation prevailed among the tribesmen, as the runners sent
out from the Butte des Morts council carried the terrible threat to all
the camps of the Winnebagoes, in the deep forests, in the pleasant oak
groves, and upon the broad prairies throughout southern Wisconsin.
Whistler had reached the ridge flanking the old portage trail between
the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, but had not fully completed the
arrangements of his camp when an Indian runner appeared in hot haste,
saying that Red Bird and Wekau would surrender themselves at three
o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, that the tribe might be
saved.
Whistler and his officers, as true soldiers, were prompt to appreciate
bravery. They were broad enough to judge these savages by the standards
of savagery, not by those of a civilization from which the Indian is
removed by centuries of human progress. They knew full well that the
culprits were but carrying out the law of their race in seeking white
scalps in vengeance for the Winnebagoes supposed to have been slain at
Fort Snelling. Whistler knew that the Indians considered Red Bird and
Wekau as heroes, and could feel no pangs of conscience, because
treachery toward enemies was the customary method of Indian warfare.
Realizing these facts, the American officers recognized that it required
a fine type of heroism on the part of these simple natives thus to offer
themselves up to probable death, to redeem their tribe from destruction.
For this reason the soldiers were brought out on parade; and when,
prompt to the hour named, Red Bird and Wekau, accompanied by a party of
their friends, came marching into camp, clad in ceremonial dress, and
singing their death songs, they were received with military honors. The
native ceremony of surrender was highly impressive. Red Bird conducted
himself with a dignity which won the admiration of all. Wekau, on the
contrary, was an indifferent looking fellow, and commanded little
respect.
Red Bird made but one request, that, although sentenced to death, he
should not be placed in chains. This was granted; and while, during his
subsequent imprisonment at Prairie du Chien, he had frequent
opportunities to escape, he declined to take advantage of them. A few
months later he fell an easy victim to an epidemic then raging in the
village, thus relieving the government from embarrassment, for it was
felt that he was altogether too good an Indian to hang; indeed, his
execution might have brought on a general border war.
The murderers of Methode were also apprehended and given a death
sentence; but upon the Winnebagoes promising to relinquish forever their
hold upon the lead mines of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern
Illinois, President Adams pardoned all the prisoners then living. The
following year (1828), a fort was erected at the Fox-Wisconsin portage,
near the scene of Red Bird's surrender; being in the heart of that
tribe's territory, it was called Fort Winnebago. Thereafter the
Winnebagoes were kept in entire subjection. Indeed, the three forts,
Howard at Green Bay, Winnebago at Portage, and Crawford at Prairie du
Chien, now gave the United States, for the first time, firm grasp upon
the whole of what is now Wisconsin.