Iowa Indians' Political and Economic Adaptations

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“We are not now as we once were”: Iowa Indians’ Political and Economic Adaptations during U.S. Incorporation

David Bernstein, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Abstract. The historical legacy of the eastern prairies between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the 1830s is dominated by a series of violent confrontations between Indians and the U.S. Army. Though the “Black Hawk Wars” involved just a few of the Indians living along the Mississippi River watershed, these conflicts epitomize commonly held understandings of Indian-white relations in the region: a violent clash of cultures in which Indians valiantly, but unsuccessfully, fought against American expansion. Contradicting this binary, Iowa Indian leaders understood that their communities had potentially much to gain from aspects of white expansion. The primary purpose of this article is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian-white relations and to illustrate how the Iowa used an assortment of political, economic, and social tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. Confronting declining wildlife resources, the Iowa began reshaping their economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future while initiating diplomatic relations with American agents to help mitigate recurring and more immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries.

In the summer of 1830, U.S. Treaty Commissioner William Clark called a council at Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River with members of the Sac, Fox, Sioux, and Iowa tribes in order to clarify boundaries between these rival Indian groups. Clark wanted to make the region between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers more attractive to Euro-American settlers, and he hoped that defining the Indians’ territorial boundaries would quell the intratribal warfare that had marked the previous decade. During the meeting, most Indian leaders claimed large portions of this territory as necessary hunting grounds, insisting that additional available lands were needed for hunting game. The Iowa representatives, however, highlighted

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their communities’ agricultural activities. Iowa chief White Cloud con- trasted his tribe’s success at farming with the other Indian groups by declaring, “I have learned to plough and I now eat my own bread and it makes me large and strong. These people [the Sac and the Fox] eat everything, and yet are lean. They can’t get fat even by eating their own words.” White Cloud hoped that by illustrating the Iowa’s recent transition from a hunting economy to one based on sedentary agriculture, he could convince the treaty commissioner to accept Iowa land claims over others. The Iowa chief understood that U.S. recognition of a larger territorial base would give his tribe more bargaining power in any future treaty negotiations. Another chief, The Crane, extended the Iowa’s claim, explaining, “Our Great Father has been trying, and we have been trying for several years to make us like the white people. We wish you to continue it a little longer, and you will perhaps see some of our young men profit by it.”1 Contradicting standard notions of nineteenth-century Indian economic and social strategies that portray the inevitability of Indian dispossession and dependency, the conciliatory words of these chiefs appear as an anomaly. The historical legacy of the region is, after all, dominated by a series of violent confrontations between Indians and the U.S. Army. For example, less than two years after this council at Prairie du Chien, Sauk chief Black Hawk and his small Indian band shocked the white settlers living along the Mississippi by their refusal to leave their villages on the Rock River. Ultimately, every member of the band was either killed or cap- tured during the “Massacre of Bad Axe.” Though the “Black Hawk Wars” involved just a few of the Indians living along the Mississippi River watershed, these conflicts epitomize commonly held understandings of Indian- white relations in the region: a violent clash of cultures in which Indians valiantly, but unsuccessfully, fought against Euro-American expansion.2 Exemplifying a typical history of the period, one scholar writes that “after decades of war and white contact [Indians] were easy to dispossess. . . . many were demoralized and drifting, with tribal structures shattered, game disappearing, and little hope of survival.”3 Rejecting the ideology of American progress and economic development, narratives of this period often suggest that Indians were forced to choose between the extremes of “acculturating to” or “resisting” the impending deluge of westward expansion.4 The words of White Cloud and The Crane reveal a complex set of motivations that defy such easy categorization. By “learning to plow” and becoming metaphorically “like white people,” the chiefs expressed conscious decisions both about their tribe’s political policies and about cultural changes they believed the Iowa should employ to meet changing

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social and environmental pressures. Rather than having a dichotomous vision of Indian-white relations, the Iowa leaders understood that their communities could gain much from aspects of white expansion. Most significant, the Iowa used diplomatic relations with U.S. agents to help maintain economic stability and territorial sovereignty. They met with Clark and other U.S. officials in order to mitigate their recurring and immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries. The primary purpose of this article, therefore, is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian- white relations and to illustrate how the Iowa used an assortment of political, economic, and social tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. In contrast to declensionary portrayals of early-nineteenth-century Indian history, the words of the Indian chiefs exemplify the adaptive, and ultimately more successful, political, social, and economic maneuvers employed by the Iowa in the early 1800s. Confronting declining wildlife resources and the continued encroachment of more powerful Indian neighbors, the Iowa in the 1820s began reshaping their economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future.5 Survival for the Iowa meant adaptation in both economic as well as political terms.6 Adap- tive political maneuvering, including the use of diplomacy, treaty-making, and even Euro-American cartography, complemented the Iowa’s evolving economic strategies while maintaining cultural traditions and aspects of territorial control. U.S. expansion in the first decades of the nineteenth century offered the Iowa opportunity as well as tragedy. Using diplomacy as a primary tactic to gain political leverage over their many rivals was not a new strategy for the Iowa. Between 1600 and 1800, Central-Siouan people—such as the Iowa—who dominated the region between the Missouri and the Mississippi developed customary practices for engaging and incorporating alien groups into their economic, military, and kinship networks. As Tanis Thorne has detailed, formal adoption ceremonies in which the redistribution of gifts cemented diplomatic and economic ties were integral aspects of Central-Siouan society.7 In the early 1680s, for example, French explorer and commandant Nicholas Perrot experienced such a ceremony firsthand when eleven Iowas approached him “weeping hot tears, whi[ch] they let fall into their hands along with saliva, and with other filth from their noses, with which they rubbed the heads, faces, and garments of the French. . . . After the tears ended the calumet was again presented to him.” Aware that this was “an honor which is granted only to those they regard as great captains,” Perrot must have felt some obligation to the Iowa. This sentiment was manifest a few days later. After a band of Sioux presented Perrot with a calumet and asked to settle near the French fort, Perrot refused to give the Sioux a direct

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answer, afraid “that they were asking to settle near him with the intention of making some raids on the Ayoes, when the latter were least expecting it.”8 Thus, the Iowa had a long history of creating diplomatic and personal ties in order to gain territorial security. For the Iowa, as with many Indians living between the Mississippi and Missouri, Euro-American settlement pressure did not become a primary concern until well into the 1840s. Until the third decade of the century, for example, the U.S. military presence in the region was negligible and Indian groups frequently vied with one another to attract U.S. forts with which to trade.9 The Iowa repeatedly met with U.S. agents, then, not to stem the tide of U.S. expansion but to create alliances to counter a more immediate changing environmental and social landscape. While the Iowa recognized increasing U.S. presence in the region, they had little reason to believe that Euro-Americans would ultimately control not only the land between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, but all of the lands west of the Mississippi. U.S. dominance was less of a concern for the Iowa than, for instance, Teton and Yanktonai Sioux expansion.10 The Iowa made political and social decisions in the first half of the nineteenth century not solely with U.S. expansion in mind, but with the same goals of protection and stability that had driven alliances of the previous century. However, while Iowa leadership’s primary goal was to maintain social and economic stability, the changes they fostered between 1815 and 1846 created a world drastically different from the one they had known.

The Challenges of Imperial Incorporation and a New Political Alliance, 1700–1815

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Iowa lived in semipermanent villages in present-day Iowa and Kansas, controlling much of the region. They subsisted by hunting, farming maize, beans, and pumpkins, and to a lesser degree, trading deer, beaver, otter, and raccoon skins with English and French traders. From fall to early spring, bands established seasonal camps in what is now southern Wisconsin and northern Iowa to hunt and make maple sugar. They returned to their villages in the early summers to tend to the small garden patches and then moved to the plains west of the Missouri for the summer buffalo hunt. Finally, the Iowa returned once again to their villages in late summer and early fall for harvesting.11 Recall- ing the Iowa’s strength in the eighteenth century, future commissioner of Indian affairs Thomas McKenney declared, “of all the tribes that hunt between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers . . . next to the Sioux . . . the Ioway were once the most numerous and powerful.”12 In the first years

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of the eighteenth century, French explorer Pierre Charles LeSueur also reported that the Mississippi was under control of the Scioux (Sioux), the Ayavoi (Iowa), and the Otoctata (Otoe). LeSueur claimed that for the Indians “it was not their custom to hunt on ground belonging to other[s], unless invited to do so by the owners.” To travel the river without follow- ing this protocol, the Frenchman continued, put one “in danger of being killed.”13 Along with the Teton and Yanktonai Sioux, the Iowa controlled the land between the rivers. LeSueur’s comments not only illustrate the authority the Iowa wielded in the region, they also indicate a system of land use in which groups controlled fairly defined territories. While anthropological investigations into Indian land claims before the reservation era have highlighted the fluidity of property ownership throughout the upper Mississippi, these studies also affirm that conquest through warfare was a viable form of land acquisition.14 For smaller groups to compete with larger bands for resources, therefore, they had little choice but to attach themselves to larger populations and create what anthropologist Patricia Albers calls a “merger.”15 According to Albers, such mergers fell into a four-step con- tinuum. In the most developed stage of “complete ethnogenesis,” once dis- tinct groups became socially and culturally indistinguishable. Albers terms the least developed merger a “polyethnic alliance formation,” in which groups remained culturally separate but cooperated in the exploitation of resources in the region, performed various ceremonial activities together, and engaged in joint military action.16 The Iowa employed such alliances throughout the 1700s. Such alliances were not unique to the Iowa in the land between the rivers. Throughout the 1700s French and Spanish traders reported a myriad of such mergers. For example, in 1700 LeSueur wrote that after a defeat at the hands of the Sioux, the Piankashaw allied themselves with the Kickapoo, Mascoutin, Fox, and Metesigami for protection from the “the Sioux of whom they are very much afraid.”17 Euro-American traders frequently identified and manipulated such alliances.18 In 1724, in the midst of a flurry of Fox antagonism toward French traders (later classified as the Second Fox War), French explorer Etienne Véniard de Bourgmont wrote that after learning of a “strong alliance” between his Otoe and Iowa trading partners and the normally antagonistic Sioux and Fox, “[he] caused the alliance to be broken.”19 While Bourgmont did not hold as much sway over the groups as he intimated, imperial activities both directly and indi- rectly shaped these relationships. Such was the case when the Teton and Yanktonai Sioux began to push into the land between the rivers in the 1770s in search of beaver to trade with colonial powers.20

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As France, Spain, and England vied for colonial control of the Mis- sissippi, the diseases their traders and explorers brought with them recali- brated an already elaborate system of alliances between various Indian groups and imperial powers.21 By the middle of the 1760s, the first of two smallpox epidemics struck the Iowa, halving their population.22 Recount- ing this period decades later, Iowa leaders explained, “although once the most powerful and warlike Indians on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, [we were] reduced to nothing, a mere handful of that Nation that was once masters of the land.”23 While population estimates for the period vary, the French trader Auguste Chouteau’s observation that the Iowa were “afraid to hunt on their own lands lest they might be attacked by the Sioux” illustrates both the decline of Iowa power as well as the continued expansion of the Western Sioux.24 Drawn to the region by the potential profits from the fur trade, the Teton and Yanktonai Sioux quickly became dominant trap- pers and traders, acquiring European guns and forcing the poorly armed and less populous Omaha, Otoe, Missouri, and Iowa to the south.25 An English lieutenant sent to Green Bay in 1760 to counter French expansion noted the Sioux aggression, reporting that the Sioux believed “all Indians were their slaves or dogs.”26 Finding security from growing Sioux aggression became increasingly imperative for Iowa survival. The last years of the eighteenth century were violent ones in the lands between the rivers as French, Spanish, and English colonial powers insti- gated rival Indian bands to fight for land, furs, and trade.27 When a second wave of smallpox struck in the first years of the nineteenth century, killing between one-quarter and one-half of the tribe, just eight hundred Iowa remained, leaving their lands vulnerable to encroachment. Unlike the Teton and Yanktonai Sioux, who lived in small nomadic groups and thus were less vulnerable to disease, the Iowa lived in two or three major villages, where germs and bacteria spread quickly.28 Unable to protect their hunting grounds from the more populous Sioux bands, the Iowa found protection among the already merged Sac and Fox peoples, who had created their alliance at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Sac offered the Fox refuge from massacring French armies.29 Living on the Fox-Wisconsin waterway in the first half of the 1700s, the Sac and Fox moved to the Mississippi Valley around 1780, maintaining their alliance but establishing separate villages on opposite sides of the Mississippi.30 Therefore, when the Iowa, decimated by smallpox, sought security from the ever expanding Yanktanai and Teton Sioux at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they found protection under the allied Sac and Fox. Sent by President Thomas Jefferson to cultivate relations with the Indians living on the Plains and also to explore the western edges of the new Louisiana Territory, Major

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Zebulon Pike reported this alliance in 1807, writing that the Iowa “hunt on the west side of the Mississippi, the river De Moyen, and westward to the Missouri; their wars and alliances are the same as the Sauks and Reynards [Fox]; under whose special protection they conceive themselves to be.”31 Though the Iowa merger with the Sac and Fox gave them satisfactory protection in the first years of the nineteenth century, their relationship began to change in 1804 with the signing of a controversial Sac treaty. This treaty between members of the Sac tribe and Treaty Commissioner Clark divided the Sac tribe and precipitated tensions between factions of Sacs and Iowas that continued for decades. These tensions became important factors in the Iowa’s decision to begin a new relationship of protection with the United States in 1815. In 1804, a group of Sacs living on the west side of the Mississippi traveled to St. Louis to meet with Governor William Henry Harrison to discuss the release of a Sac prisoner. From this innocuous beginning came a treaty that ultimately divided the Sac people and precipitated the Black Hawk War.32 While the details of the proceedings remain unclear, the resulting treaty left little doubt about the magnitude of the meeting. In the treaty, the Sac ceded all claims to land on the east side of the Mississippi in exchange for annuities of one thousand dollars and gifts totaling just under thirty-five hundred dollars.33 There are many reasons why this small group of Missouri River Sacs may have signed the 1804 treaty. Living hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi, the representatives potentially wanted to get annuities and protection in exchange for lands east of the Mississippi that were of no consequence to them. Perhaps, as a letter from Major James Bruff to Gen- eral James Wilkinson attests, the Sacs were so disgusted by the news of an Osage party leaving St. Louis “loaded with presents” and “puffed up with ideas of their great superiority,” that they were driven to “make a treaty that wou’d shelter them from their natural enemies—the Osages, now consider’d by them as under the protection of the United States.”34 Or, perhaps the Sacs simply did not understand what they were signing, as they professed in a letter to the secretary of war a year later: “We were desirous to oblige the United States,” the letter stated, “but we had never before Sold Land, and we did not know the value of it.”35 Regardless of the reasons, the treaty not only fractured the Sac-Fox alliance but, more important for the Iowa, caused such division within the Sac tribe that the Iowa were now under the protection of a band no larger than their own. The Iowa, therefore, were once again vulnerable to Yanktonai and Teton attacks. Approximately six thousand Sac living on the Rock River on the east side of the Mississippi contested the treaty, while the combined Iowa,

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Sac, and Fox population living between the rivers was closer to two thousand, with only six hundred warriors.36 The Iowa now needed protection from both the Rock River Sac and the expanding Sioux. As Indian agent Nicholas Boilvin reported in 1811, with over six thousand members, the Sioux dominated the smaller groups of Menominees, Winnebagos, Foxes, Sacs, and Iowas living between the rivers.37 Sioux hegemony did not bring stability. In fact, turmoil in the region was greater than ever. Multiple factors created an atmosphere of violence: French, U.S., and English trading partners spurred Indian factionalism; older tribal enmities continued; disease decimated populations; and, most significant, the sudden reduction in wildlife resources strained food sources and fur supplies. One Omaha attack on the Iowa in the summer of 1814 reportedly left the Iowa “annihilated,” while a better documented Sioux attack in June 1815 killed twenty-two Iowas and destroyed their crops along the Chariton River. With a population perhaps a quarter of what it had been a century earlier, and under continual pressure for hunting grounds from the Sioux in the north, the Otoe and Omaha in the west, and now the Rock River Sac in the east, the Iowa did what vulnerable bands of Indians in the region had done for generations: they attached themselves to a powerful neighbor.38 No longer able to find protection under the Sac and Fox, the Iowa turned their attention to a growing power in the region, the United States.39 Just months after the Sioux attack, on 16 December 1815 at Portage des Sioux on the Missouri River, the Iowa Indians entered into their first treaty with the United States at a meeting also attended by Kickapoos, Big and Little Osages, Sacs of the Missouri River, and Foxes. In a series of letters to Secretary of War Henry Calhoun, the explorer-cum-treaty commissioner William Clark explained that his treaty proposal was met with “a consider- able backwardness, if not positive reluctance,” by several of the tribes, most notably the Sac of Rock River, who “refused to treat us in the most positive manner.” However, despite confining the parameters of the treaties to the “sole object of peace,” as directed, Clark reported that unlike the other participants of the meeting, the Iowa Indians were “extremely solicitous that they embrace other subjects.” According to Clark, the Iowa proposed a “spontaneous offer” to come more closely under the protection of the United States in exchange for annuities and the cession of a small portion of their lands.40 The Iowa’s “spontaneous offer” to Clark to cede some of their lands for protection must be understood in the context of a dwindling population forced to find security in an increasingly violent region. It was, therefore, neither a “spontaneous” nor an unqualified “offer.” By signing the treaty of 1815 with the United States, the Iowa agreed to share some

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of their lands with the Americans in exchange for an alliance in warfare. The treaty between the Iowa and the United States was, therefore, similar to the “merger” process that the Iowa had been relying on since the first smallpox epidemic decimated their population sixty years earlier, and on 16 September 1815 Clark and fifteen representatives of the Iowa people signed a treaty of “peace and friendship.”41 It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to view the 1815 treaty as evidence of Iowa acceptance of, and even culpability in, the eventual U.S. dominance of the region. Such a view, however, distorts the reality in which the Iowa lived. The Iowa’s proposal to General Clark to cede some of their lands in exchange for protection is best understood in the context of earlier Iowa responses to changes brought about by disease and warfare. Also, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Americans were not the Iowa’s primary concern. According to Richard White, Indians whose territory bordered the northern and central Great Plains felt that the crucial invasion of their lands came not only from whites, but also from the Sioux, who “remained their most feared enemy.”42 The Iowa’s alliance with the United States and with surrounding tribes illustrates their over- whelming concern for a Sioux intrusion onto their lands. In addition, the Iowa’s relationship to the United States was one not of capitulation but negotiation. It is apparent that, despite the cession of land, the Iowa did not expect their relationship with their American brothers to be one of subordination. The Iowa themselves would continue to decide their political alliances. For example, in 1819 Indian agent Major Benjamin O’Fallon requested that the Omaha, Otoe, Pawnee, and Iowa make peace. Iowa chief White Cloud made his intentions to the Americans clear by declaring, “If the whites compel us to make peace with the Pawnees, we will, if we can do no better, scratch you with our toe and finger nails and gnaw you with our teeth. Now my brother has our answer.”43 For the Iowa, therefore, transfer of land did not inherently mean subjugation.

“They looked the very spirit of defiance”: Changing Political Tactics, 1815–1830

Though the Iowa had made an alliance with the United States to gain territorial security, this agreement did little to stop the violence between rival Indian groups. The Iowa lived in what one traveler called a state of “perpetual warfare,” as they engaged in conflicts with their neighbors on all sides.44 The Kansa and Big and Little Osage threatened from the south, while the Yanktonai and Teton Sioux came from the northwest, and the Rock River Sac continued pressing their claims from the east.45 Ceaseless

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bloodshed prompted Hard Heart to approach Agent George Sibley in 1819 and reiterate the tribe’s desire for protection and assistance. In a letter to then governor Clark, Sibley forwarded an explanation of Hard Heart’s request: “They are surrounded [Hard Heart] says on every side by enemies, who are continually making war upon them; which compels them to be always on the watch, sleeping with one eye open, and one hand on their guns; so that they have but little time to hunt for the subsistence of their families.”46 Hard Heart’s words were more prescient than he could have known, for early the next year he was killed by a band of Yankton Sioux.47 The Iowa’s transition to an agricultural economy, however, was not predicated solely on issues of defense. Throughout the 1810s, a new issue for the Iowa arose, compounding their problems of territorial security. Trade wars among the American Fur Company and various independent St. Louis traders, such as Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Manuel Lisa’s and Joshua Pilcher’s Missouri Company, took heavy tolls on the deer, beaver, raccoon, and otter populations. Since William Clark and Meriwether Lewis’s expedition passed through the area in 1804, the United States had pushed for a greater presence there.48 Politicians in Washington believed that U.S. fur traders could work within the existing trade networks to pave the way for U.S. expansion.49 To this end, the United States created the factory system, whereby Indian agents could sell manufactured goods to Indians in exchange for furs at various forts along the Mississippi and Missouri. Between 1808 and 1815 Americans established factories at Forts Osage, Madison, Shelby, Armstrong, and Snelling. As a result of the increased hunting and trapping these forts encouraged, the game on which the Iowa depended became scarce. The St. Louis merchants vied for the services of Iowa, Omaha, Otoe, Missouri, Pawnee, Sioux, and Sac hunters, and game declined accordingly.50 Four years before the 1815 treaty, Indian agent Nicholas Boilvin had reported that the Sac, Fox, and Iowa have “abandoned the chase, except to furnish themselves with meat,” indicating the growing scarcity of game and fur. Boilvin also stated that these tribes had turned their attention to their lead mines, sixty miles below Prairie du Chien.51 Boilvin was wrong about the Iowa, who did not mine, but his comments indicate the rapidly diminishing supply of game.52 The St. Louis Gazette reported this prob- lem more directly in 1814: “The country north of the St. Charles, which extends from the river Mississippi to the Missouri, had been for a long period the hunting ground of the Sioux and Ioways, but as wild animals became scarce they moved west, and the Sacks, who had hitherto resided on the east side of the Mississippi, occupied the country.”53 The Iowa now

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needed not only to protect their territorial sovereignty but also to find enough food to survive. Throughout the early 1800s they looked to the treaty process as a strategy to combat growing social and environmental pressures. For the Iowa, therefore, political maneuvers became among the most important responses to severe economic and social upheaval. They used these political negotiations to lay a foundation for future economic and social stability. They saw U.S. territorial and national leaders not only as possible allies against Sioux expansion but also as keys to their future subsistence and survival. By 1820, making treaties with the United States had, however, also become a tactic some Indians employed to garner land to which they may not have had a “rightful” claim. In 1824, for example, when the Rock River Sac, headed by the great orator Keokuk, attempted to cede land that the Iowa had controlled for decades, Iowa chiefs White Cloud and Moana- honga went to Washington to dispute the claim.54 While the chiefs forcefully rejected Keokuk’s assertion, the two did not make a case for Iowa occupation of the disputed land, which they found of no use for their changing needs. Instead, during the August 1824 meeting, the Iowa decided on a new course of action. Rather than vainly try to protect a nearly depleted hunting range from stronger aggressors, they proposed to give up the land in exchange for additional goods. The chiefs also requested annuities, a blacksmith, farming equipment, a farmer, and cattle in exchange for a large tract of their grounds in northern Missouri. White Cloud declared, “I now relinquish the claim which the Ioways may have to that portion of Country [which we see on that paper] to the American people, and have only to request that your nation will send what they intend giving us, to our villages.”55 Diplomacy, therefore, became a vehicle by which the Iowa hoped to change from a mobile hunting society to a sedentary agricultural one. For the second time in as many treaty meetings with the Americans, the Iowa offered to cede parts of their land in order to gain other economic benefits. The Americans accepted the proposal, and on 4 August 1824 the Iowa formerly initiated what they hoped would be a more secure and sedentary way of life.56 The security the Iowa hoped for by signing the 1824 treaty proved ephemeral. The United States had initiated so many treaties with conflict- ing cessions, including those with the Iowa, that violence between signa- tory nations actually escalated as war parties tried to solidify their competing treaty claims.57 In addition, reports of the U.S. failure to abide by its agreements began circulating through the land between the rivers. To quell the violence and to maintain positive relations with as many tribes as possible, General Clark decided to hold another treaty meeting. At this meet-

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ing, held at Prairie du Chien in 1825, Clark intended to establish “permanent” boundaries between the tribes. Clark hoped that creating boundaries would not only reduce Indian violence, making the area more attractive to settlers, but also allow the United States to make definitive treaties for the transfer of valuable lands along the rivers. Ironically, it would be during this treaty session, called to clarify boundaries, that a seemingly innocuous agreement between the Sac and Fox and the Iowa would result in massive land loss for the latter, and initiate over a century of diplomatic and legal wrangling.58 When Clark arrived at Prairie du Chien on 30 July 1825, nearly one thousand Chippewa, Sioux, Winnebago, Menominee, Pottawatomie, and Ottawa Indians had already established themselves on the grounds, but the Sac, Fox, and Iowa delegations had not arrived. Then, on 4 August a flotilla of seventy canoes came rushing down the Mississippi carrying the missing participants, who were armed with spears, clubs, guns, and knives, and sang war songs. According to one report, “No tribes attracted so intense a degree of interest as the Iowas and the Sac and Fox, tribes of radically diverse languages, yet united in league against the Sioux. . . . They beat drums. They uttered yells at definite points. They landed in compact ranks. They looked the very spirit of defiance.”59 For a moment, at least, the battle lines were drawn as the Sac, Fox, and Iowa joined in concert against the Sioux. Familiar with dozens of treaties in the region over the last twenty years, the Iowa, Sac, and Fox knew of the U.S. tactic of recognizing territorial claims of larger groups over those of smaller ones. Overlooking the disagreements from the previous year’s meeting in Washington, the leaders of the three tribes knew they must speak with one voice if they hoped to counter the Sioux’s strength. Despite White Cloud’s previous attempt to gain exclusive rights of cession to the land south of the Des Moines River, he and the other Iowa leaders saw this council as an opportunity to guar- antee Sioux exclusion from the region. To do so, the Iowa would have to align their fortunes with the Sac and the Fox. Fortunately for the Iowa, the strategy worked. The Sioux boundary line was established at the upper fork of the Des Moines River, north of the Iowa’s primary hunting ground. However, to achieve this demarcation, the Iowa agreed that they would not define the boundary between themselves and the Sac and Fox at that time, and they would “peaceably occupy the same, until some satisfactory arrangement can be made between them for a division of their respective claims to the country.”60 Therefore, while the 1825 Treaty of Prairie du Chien secured the southern portion of the land between the rivers from Sioux warriors, it did nothing to augment the

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Iowa’s shrinking supply of game, which they now had to share with both the Missouri Sac, who had remained in the region since the divisive 1804 Sac treaty, and the Rock River Sac, who now agreed to move to the land between the rivers. The search for a “satisfactory agreement” became a point of contention between the tribes and determined the Iowa’s political tactics for the next fifteen years.

A New Economic Strategy, 1830–1846

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, travelers reported what Indi- ans had known for years: that the game between the rivers was rapidly diminishing. Maximilian, the prince of Wied, wrote in 1832 that there were formerly hundreds of elks in these parts, but “now they are rarely met with.”61 Similarly, Major Ketchum of the Sixth Infantry wrote that Indians were compelled to go to his fort for provisions because of the scarcity of game on the Missouri.62 The most telling, and ultimately accurate, account came from Treaty Commissioner Clark: “Hunting will be nearly at an end in this tract of country in the course of two or three years, and it will not then be necessary to retain it for this purpose any longer.”63 Clark’s observation provides a blueprint of the Iowa’s quandary. Confronted by a depleted hunting ground, the Iowa now turned their attention to other forms of subsistence. Though they had used agriculture to augment their food supply for centuries, they had never wholly relied on farming to survive, and the rapid transition to an economy based in agriculture brought changes in gender relations, cultural adaptations, and political and social rifts. Reports of Iowa participation in a Jesuit school north of St. Louis epitomize some of these changes. When the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the “Civilization Fund” in 1824, Jesuits used some of this money to establish St. Regis, the first Catholic school for Indians west of the Mis- sissippi. Learning of the school, some of the Iowa decided to send their sons to learn carpentry, blacksmithing, and agriculture with Father Van Quickenbourne, the teacher at the school. On the journey to St. Regis, some Missouri Sacs intercepted the group and tried to persuade the chiefs not to send their sons with the Jesuit. Despite the Sac protestations, on 25 April 1825, Quickenbourne reported that as the chiefs had met with Gen- eral Clark in St. Louis, their sons continued on to St. Regis, where they dressed in European-style clothing. When the fathers met their sons at the school, they were amazed by the changes they saw. One chief reportedly stated, “I wish all Indian boys were Catholics.”64 Another did not express such a positive view however, when the nature of their education became

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more apparent. After witnessing his son carry a bucket of water, manual labor that was traditionally women’s work, the father asked, “Are you a slave?”65 While such confusion over changing gender roles became common throughout the Plains in the nineteenth century, the Iowa accepted their new roles more readily than other tribes.66 For example, when Agent Clark hired a white married couple to act as a farmer for the men and teacher for the women, he instructed the farmer to encourage the men to cultivate “by getting them to take hold of the plough,” and the women to be shown to “milk the cows, make the butter, and also the art of spinning.”67 In November of that year, after discussing his disappointment with surrounding tribes, Clark expressed hope for the Iowa’s situation, explaining that they had built three hewn-log houses, fifteen women were taking spinning and weaving instruction, and “many Indians were capable of giving instructions to others in the new skill.”68 Clark’s instructions that the Iowa learn to plough marked the beginnings of an important shift in the nature of their agricultural economy. Though a string of agency farmers would participate in the breaking of ground for the next decade, the Iowa’s use of a plow and oxen became much more common, a fact highlighted by White Cloud during the second Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1830: “Sioux, Sacs & Foxes, that are here! Look upon me and you look upon almost a white man. . . . I have learned to plough and I now eat my own bread and it makes me large and strong. These people [the Sac and the Fox] eat everything, and yet are lean. They can’t get fat even by eating their own words.” In addition to revealing the Iowa’s use of the plow, White Cloud’s statement shows his anger toward his Sac and Fox neighbors and hints at the latter’s inability to “peaceably occupy the same [territory]” with the Iowa, as agreed to at Prairie du Chien in 1825. In fact, continued fighting over territorial boundaries between not only the Iowa and Sac and Fox, but also the Otoe, Omaha, and Sioux, prompted Clark to organize the meeting at which White Cloud showed his anger in 1830. At this second treaty meeting at Prairie du Chien, another Iowa chief, The Crane, spoke of his tribe’s success in relation to the Sac and Fox: “Fathers! Here are two of our relations—the Sacs & Foxes. They have hunted their lands till there is nothing left. . . . Our Great Father has been trying, and we have been trying for several years to make us like the white people. We wish you to continue it a little longer, and you will perhaps see some of our young men profit by it.”69 As with the Iowa’s use of Jesuit education for their children, White Cloud’s metaphorical assertion of being “almost a white man” does not signify his desire to assimilate into white culture. For the Iowa, being “like white people” involved a set of

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activities, some of which could be “continued a little longer” or stopped at will. In fact, just moments after making his pledge to continue such activities, The Crane also declared to the assembly, “You know we are not like white people to lay up money.”70 So while the chiefs claimed to act “as white people” in some circumstances, they distanced themselves from such comparisons when necessary. For these representatives of the Iowa, being “like the white people” referred to a specific set of actions, such as farming with a plow, not cultural assimilation. The Iowa, at least for the time being, wanted to show their ability to emulate some aspects of Euro- American society, and in so doing, hoped to place themselves above the Sac and the Sioux in the eyes of the American agents. Unfortunately for the Iowa, the second treaty of Prairie du Chien did not establish tribal boundaries between the Iowa and Sac as had been stipulated by the 1825 accord. Instead, the United States continued to delay the delineation of separate Iowa and Sac lands, proposing a common hunting ground encompassing the modern state of Iowa, with intertribal boundaries to be “marked as soon as the President of the United States may deem it expedient.” In exchange for allowing the United States to locate other displaced tribes in the region, the Iowa, Sac, Fox, Omaha, Otoe, Missouri, and Yankton Sioux received additional annuities and more agricultural implements.71 While they did not secure land independent of the Sac, the Iowa’s cession of land above the line separating theirs and the Sac from Sioux land, established in the 1825 Treaty of Prairie du Chien, meant little, as hunters had virtually extinguished game in the area, and the Iowa lacked the population to control the region even if game returned. While the United States offered insufficient payment for the land, the exchange of contested and gameless land for annuities was a conscious political maneuver by Iowa leadership. In addition, using part of their annuities, the Iowa secured a tract of country for the “half-breeds” of the Omaha, Otoe, and Iowa tribes.72 The Iowa, and apparently the Sac, now realized that the most profit- able use of the land they held in common—in what is now northern Mis- souri—would be to cede it to the United States. In April 1834, the Iowa and the Sac approached Agent Andrew Hughes to ask for a meeting to discuss this possibility. According to Hughes, the Iowa wished to sell their land because “they were tired of the chase and wish to become like whitemen.” In return, the tribe once again asked for domestic animals, an educational fund for their children, and farming equipment. They also wanted to maintain a small portion of their territory for agricultural purposes.73 Seven months later, Hughes again asked Clark to allow him to make a treaty with the Iowa as the Indians were “pressing [him] daily for the tools.”74

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For the second time in four years, the Iowa asserted their desire to make agriculture their primary mode of living. Hughes granted that request and on 17 September 1836, the Iowa ceded all of their land lying between the Missouri River and the northern boundary of the state of Missouri and agreed to move to a strip of land on the west side of the Missouri River, abutting the Wolf River. They also were to receive seventy-five hundred dollars, rations for a year, a farmer, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, an inter- preter, a ferryboat, a mill, and five “comfortable houses.” In addition, two hundred acres of ground were to be broken for farming, and the tribe was to be supplied with one hundred cows and calves, five bulls, and one hundred stock hogs.75 According to a letter from Agent Hughes, the Iowa quickly moved to their new land, where they seemed “highly pleased with their situation.” On the land, they erected forty-one bark houses, each one with a small field or a patch of corn.76 Significantly, Keokuk did not sign the 1836 agreement, an indication that the Mississippi Sac did not participate in the treaty. However, Keokuk did sign three additional Sac treaties in 1836 that ceded land jointly controlled by the Sac and Iowa; a maneuver that greatly disturbed the Iowa. In addition to ceding land without the Iowa’s consent, Keokuk signed the treaties as a representative of the Mississippi Sac, a group the Iowa felt had no legitimate claim to the area. The more land bargained off by the Mississippi Sac, the less bargaining power the Iowa held. In a letter to President Andrew Jackson requesting permission to come to Washington to contest the Sac claim, the Iowa wrote that “oppression of the most unsparing manner” had been heaped on them by the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi. While the treaty of 1825 allowed the Sac to hunt on lands west of the Mississippi, the Iowa asserted that they had not intended to give up any ownership of the land. Further, the Iowa held that the Mis- sissippi Sac never took the land by conquest, the most important factor in land claims by Indians in the region.77 As support for their claim, the Iowa asked Clark to write a letter on their behalf. The Iowa held Clark, the former explorer and treaty commissioner and current superintendent of the St. Louis Bureau of Indian Affairs, in high regard. In the letter, Clark explained that when he first arrived in the area, the Iowa possessed “an immense tract of land” between the Mississippi and the Missouri in which they still held an undivided interest. Clark’s letter, along with the Iowa’s letter to President Jackson, persuaded the commissioner of Indian affairs to invite the Iowa and the Sac to Washington.78 The Iowa needed to convince the commissioner that they had historic control of the land between the rivers, thereby producing an exclusive Iowa claim, making further negotiations with the Americans more beneficial. For their part,

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the Sac hoped to prove that they had taken the area by force, justifying their ability to bargain with the United States for it. The success of the Iowa’s claim was now contingent on their political maneuvering as well as on their ability to clarify their competing territorial claims with the Sac.

Cartographic Strategies and Final Territorial Demarcations, 1837–1846

In a rented Presbyterian church on the morning of 7 October 1837, the Iowa and Sac met with U.S. Secretary of War Joel Poinsett and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cory A. Harris to discuss the extent of each group’s claim. Notchininga, the second chief under White Cloud, presented a map to the U.S. officials that he claimed showed the extent of Iowa lands (fig. 1). The map depicted an area extending from what is now northeastern Wisconsin on Lake Michigan, to western Nebraska on the Missouri River, and from southern Minnesota on the Mississippi River to an area just south of St. Louis. The map also showed a dotted line, beginning near Green Bay, Wisconsin, and continuing south to the Iowa’s current village on the Wolf River. The map represented the geographical and historical migration of the Iowa people and the villages they had occupied since the fifteenth century. “This is the route of my forefathers,” Notchininga stated. “It is the land we have always claimed from old times we have the history we have always owned this land it is ours it bears our name.” Finding settlements that could only have belonged to the Iowa, twentieth-century archeologists have reinforced Notchininga’s depiction of the Iowa’s migration.79 This meeting may seem to fit into a standard historical account of the treaty-making process, with a group of Indians claiming land through ancestral occupation. If we examine the map created by the Iowa for this meeting more closely, however, a clear political agenda emerges that fits into the larger pattern of Iowa political maneuvers.80 Notchininga’s Map, as it has come to be known, does not share many of the characteristics of other American Indian maps.81 While scholar Barbara Belyea acknowl- edges the extreme hazards of generalizing about the myriad of indigenous cultures of North America and the maps they created, she nonetheless argues the existence of a fully developed Amerindian cartographic convention, including the lack of frame—or other indicators of territory outside of the map’s projection—and a constantly shifting scale derived from a principle of “linear coherence.”82 This principle can be illustrated by a map in which objects closer to a point of origin appear bigger than those farther away, rather than a typical European map that uses a static scale from a “bird’s-eye” view. Notchininga’s Map contradicts both of these

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/54/4/605/410227/EH054-04-04BernsteinFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Figure 1. Notchininga’s Map, 1837, 41 × 27 inches. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Cartographic and Architectural Branch, Washington, DC, RG 75, map 821, tube 520.

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guidelines. While there is neither a formal frame nor lines of longitude or latitude that represent knowledge of a larger spatial construction, the lines depicting rivers bleed directly off the page. Such convention indicates an understanding of a world beyond the boundaries of the paper. Perhaps most important, once the map is flipped on a vertical axis, the spatial representation does not follow the model of linear coherence; instead, it follows more closely a European convention. In other words, rather than a representation in which the scale is dependant on one’s point of view, Notchininga’s Map uses a constant scale with the familiar perspective from above.83 In fact, Notchininga’s Map is so spatially accurate, it differs from a modern hydrography map of the region only in details (fig. 2).84 The question one must ask, therefore, is why does this map lack the most important characteristic of other “Indian” maps? The answer lies not in abstract claims about indigenous cultures but in the shifting sociopolitical concerns of the Iowa. It is impossible to know precisely why the Iowa created the map. However, Iowa political maneuvers used at other meetings with U.S. officials indicate that the creation of this map fits into a larger strategy. By adapting aspects of European spatial constructions, the Iowa continued the tactic they had used seven years earlier in negotiating the second treaty of Prairie du Chien. At that earlier meeting, White Cloud and The Crane tried to separate themselves from the Sac in the eyes of the Americans by claiming they were like “whitemen,” while the Sac, they argued, were untrustworthy. With the creation of Notchininga’s Map, the Iowa emu- lated additional aspects of Euro-American culture. By creating a document similar to ones employed by the United States in 1825 and again in 1830 to create territorial boundaries, the Iowa proved their understanding of Euro-American territoriality as well as their capacity to adopt foreign techniques. As they had with plows, the Iowa used cartographic tools to communicate their needs. Moreover, although Notchininga demarcated all of the previous Iowa villages, dating back hundreds of years, he neglected the villages located in the area ceded in 1830.85 This indicates that, despite his claim against the Sac, Notchininga respected his community’s earlier cession to the United States. Cartographic strategies aside, Notchininga was more direct in his verbal claim to the area. He stated that while the Sac had been invited to “divide the game” during the Iowa-Sac merger in the first years of the nineteenth century, it was never understood that “they were to have our lands.”86 While he did not dispute the Sac’s current military dominance over the Iowa, Notchininga rested his argument on his tribe’s historic control of the region. Keokuk, citing the importance of territorial conquest,

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Figure 2. Contemporary Interpretation of Notchininga’s Map with Modern Hydrography Map. Reproduced from David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), figure 4.8. Reprinted courtesy of David Turnbull and the University of Chicago Press.

rebutted that regardless of the Iowa’s past claims, the Sac had forcefully taken the Iowa’s land, thereby rightfully gaining control of the region. He continued that the only reason the Iowa marked so many villages on their map was because they were forced to flee from the Sac: “This is country I have gained by fighting. Therefore, I claim it. Our people once inhabited the country about the Great Lakes. We were driven off. You don’t hear me claiming the country. This is my country. I have fought for it.”87 Perhaps legitimizing their own process of expansion, the United States commissioners decided that Keokuk’s claim of territorial conquest was strong enough to give the Sac control of the remaining land between the rivers. Disgusted, the Iowa withdrew from the treaty council, turning down numerous cession proposals, and refused to participate in further meetings.88 While the treaties of 1824, 1825, 1830, and 1836 ended with terms that the Iowa helped dictate, the October 1837 treaty did not end as positively. The meeting, called by both the Iowa and the Sac in order to clarify each tribe’s territory, ended with the Sac and the Fox gaining control of land that they had occupied with the Iowa for less than two decades, allowing the Sac and the Fox to dictate the terms of cessions to the United States. Keokuk’s oratory had convinced Commissioner of Indian Affairs Harris and Secretary of War Poinsett of the legitimacy of the Sac’s military con-

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quest of the Iowa, when in reality much of the Sac presence in the region could be traced back to their merger with the Iowa at the beginning of the century. The decision by these U.S. agents underscores their inability to recognize an established process of Indian diplomacy. Rather than military dominance, the Iowa believed that they had created a relationship with the Sac in the first years of the nineteenth century that was part of a social system benefiting both parties. The Americans, however, only saw the military strength of the Sac. While the Iowa now “owned” a fraction of the land they had controlled just fifty years earlier, their attempts to adapt to the social pressures around them reveal a perseverance that counters the tragedy of land loss. Despite their anger, the Iowa knew that U.S. support was still necessary to aid their transition to an agrarian economy. Otherwise, as the Iowa con- fessed to one of the Indian agents, they knew that they would be forced to move back to the Des Moines River, where they would be unable to compete with the Sioux and Sac for resources.89 So, rather than complete dispossession and diaspora, the Iowa chose to retain a small portion of their former lands. A few months after the 1837 Sac treaty in Washington, the Iowa agreed to move south of the Missouri River, where they created a permanent village. In exchange, the Iowa were to receive $157,000 in investments, with at least 5 percent interest paid annually to the tribe in perpetuity. Also, the Americans were to provide funds for education, agriculture, blacksmith facilities, and “the construction of ten houses with good floors, one door and two windows.”90 In addition, the Iowa requested that they move from the Wolf River, whose soil was described by Agent Hughes to be “extremely poor,” to the more fertile lands on the Great Nemaha River, which contained “fine productive soil, with plenty of good timber, [and] exhaustless quantities of stone.”91 Not all of the Iowas agreed to move to their new lands. A portion of the tribe rejected the new agreement signed by White Cloud’s son, Frank White Cloud, Notchininga, and eleven other chiefs. Many who had moved to the village on the Wolf River as stipulated by the treaty of 1836 refused to cross the Missouri due to “some difficulties between them and their chiefs.”92 This group of one hundred and forty men, women, and children, held that “the Great Spirit made them on [the north] side of the river . . . and if they were unwilling to cross the river it was the fault of the Great Spirit and no one else.”93 They subsequently went to live with the Potta- watomie in northern Iowa, where they stayed for eight years before return- ing to the new Iowa village on the Great Nemaha River.94 The rest of the tribe, however, seemed to take quickly to their new,

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more fertile land. Within a year of their relocation, the Iowa produced an abundance of crops, so abundant that when the painter George Catlin passed through the region, he claimed that of the tribes living on the Mis- souri, “the Ioways may be said to be the farthest departed from primi- tive modes, as they are depending chiefly on their corn-fields for subsistence.”95 Two years after Catlin’s visit, Aubrey Ballard, the farmer assisting the Iowa, reported that they had produced fifteen thousand bushels of corn, potatoes, squash, and other vegetables.96 Since this was more than enough food for the tribe to survive, they traded these foodstuffs with the surrounding Kansas and Otoe tribes.97 By contrast, Agent John Dougherty reported that the Sac were “in a state of starvation.”98 In 1837, the Iowa numbered twelve hundred, while the Sac population was approximately sixty-five hundred. Just five years later, the annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs listed the Iowa’s population as having increased by three hundred people from the earlier count, while the Sac’s population had plummeted to twenty-seven hundred souls.99 Much had changed in the thirty years since U.S. explorer Zebulon Pike declared, “[The Iowa] cultivate some corn; but not so much in proportion as the Sauks. . . . Their residence being on the small streams of the Mississippi, out of the high roads of commerce, renders them less civilized.”100 In fact, not only did the Iowa now cultivate more corn than the Sac, the Iowa were reportedly “much pleased” with their new residences, each of which featured, as stipulated, good floors, two windows, and one door.101 In addition to the new houses, Agent Dougherty observed another change in domestic patterns in the spring of 1838, when he described the tribe as living less in “bands or squads,” and that the Indians were planting individual plots rather than a common body of ground.102 The adoption of many Euro-American ways did not turn the Iowa away from more traditional aspects of their culture.103 Despite agreeing to allocate part of their annuities for the creation of a boarding school, the chiefs continued the practice of ceremonial reciprocity by demanding they be sent medals, “to show we are good friends to our great father.”104 Similarly, Subagent William Richardson reported in 1842 that the practice of polygamy continued relatively unabated, with some men having as many as three wives living in their homes.105 The creation and deployment of Iowa war parties also continued. The Presbyterian missionary Samuel Irvin reported that even White Cloud, who was one of the most eager to utilize aspects of Euro-American culture, participated in acts of retribu- tion against neighboring Indians.106 On 14 May 1848, White Cloud led a group of warriors against the Pawnee. When Subagent Alfred J. Vaughn demanded an explanation, White Cloud responded, “The Pawnee steal our

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horses. If the white soldiers can kill the Pawnee, why can’t we?”107 White Cloud embodied the Iowa’s unique amalgamation of Euro-American farming and educational practices and vigorous defense of established cultural traditions, apparent in a telling 1846 Samuel Irvin report: “There is, in this respect, a remarkable difference between these two tribes; though the Sacs seem, in many respects, to be far before the Iowas—less drunken, better off for provisions, more high-minded, noble and independent, and often more judicious in their conduct towards the white; yet in point of having their children educated, and in their desires to learn and adopt the ways of the whites, the Iowas seem to me many years advance[d].”108 It is impossible to know what Irvin meant by his claim that the Sac were more “noble and independent,” but it was no doubt connected to the Iowa’s continued refusal to accept annuities individually. Instead, they demanded that money be paid to the chiefs for them to allocate—a more traditional distribution pattern based on social hierarchy.109 Finally, when anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan passed through the Iowa village in 1860, he documented dozens of traditional Iowa dances and ceremonies.110 Perhaps the most unusual example of Iowa cultural expression came from an 1843 trip to Europe taken by fourteen Iowas, including White Cloud, with the artist George Catlin. On their journey, the Iowas traveled to England, France, and Belgium, met various kings and queens, and performed dances in Catlin’s traveling exhibition. While this trip, and in fact all of Catlin’s work, has frequently been characterized as exploitative and romantic, Catlin’s journal of the Indians on the trip gives a different pic- ture.111 He states that although he had been criticized for taking advantage of the Indians, it was they who had approached him with the idea of tour- ing Europe. Further, he states, they had done so “avowedly for the purpose of making money.”112 While it is impossible to verify Catlin’s claim, we should not assume that the Iowa were either too traditional or somehow too uninterested in profit to pursue the opportunity of making money by demonstrating aspects of their culture. Instead, this trip should be seen as part of a continuing Iowa adaptive transition into a market economy, as well as an effort to enjoy other Euro-American practices, such as leisure travel. Describing the cultural changes of the Iowa, Notchininga declared, “We are not now as we once were, once we were so poor and ignorant that we made fire by rubbing sticks together, but we have improved.”113 Clearly, many of the Iowa embraced their new life on the Great Nemaha River. For many Iowas, life on the Great Nemaha was now unquestionably different than the one they envisioned just twenty-three years earlier when

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they entered into their first treaty with the United States. In the first years of the century, they hunted across hundreds of thousands of acres; now, they lived primarily as farmers on a few hundred acres. However, to frame the history of the Iowa in the first half of the nineteenth century entirely as a narrative of dispossession disregards their social adaptation and political maneuvering. Such a framework not only ignores the creativity of Iowa leadership but also simplifies the social landscape to an Indian-white binary. The Iowa repeatedly allied themselves with the United States to gain political leverage. They made conscious decisions about which political and social strategies to employ in order to counter a dwindling supply of game and encroachment onto their lands. On at least five separate occa- sions, Iowa leaders offered to cede portions of their lands to gain the benefits, first of protection, then of agricultural assistance. The Iowa used the political tools available to them to create what they hoped would be a more stable future, one that revolved primarily around the now dominant subsistence strategy in the region, agriculture.114

Notes

1 National Archives (hereafter NA), Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (hereafter BIA), RG 75, “Documents Relating to Ratified and Unratified Treaties,” T494, roll 2, Minutes of Council held at Prairie du Chien, 7–16 July 1830. 2 For more on the Black Hawk War, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, Prelude to Disaster: The Course of Indian-White Relations Which Led to the Black Hawk War of 1832 (Springfield, IL, 1970). For Black Hawk’s account, see Donald Jackson, ed., Blackhawk: An Autobiography (Urbana, IL, 1990). 3 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 192. 4 For studies that complicate such a view, see, e.g., Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Metis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832 (Lincoln, NE, 2000), in which Murphy describes Fox Indians’ successful mining operations; and Frederick Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935 (New York, 1995). Also see Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862 (Lincoln, NE, 1984); and Tanis Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia, MO, 1996). For a discussion of U.S. expansionism in the early republics, see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (Norman, OK, 1992). 5 While there are over seventy spellings of “Iowa” used to designate the tribe, these variations were phonetic pronunciations of the name used by the Indians themselves, such as “aj u wej”; Mildred Wedel Mott, “A Synonym of Names for the Iowa Indians” Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society 26 (1978): 48– 72. I will use the name Iowa unless the tribe is referred to differently in the original documents.

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6 In contrast to the predominance of dependency and world-system theory in the field of Indian history during the 1970s and 1980s, more recent works explore the interconnectedness of diplomacy and economics. Rather than using a universal economic model of incorporation, these histories investi- gate the diversity and complexity of Indian-colonial relationships throughout the continent. See, e.g., Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York, 1997); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York, 1999); and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (New York, 1991). 7 Thorne, Many Hands, 3. 8 Emma Helen Blair, Indian Tribes of the Mississippi and Great Lakes Region, ed. Richard White (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 368–71. 9 As late as 1830, Indian groups in the region were competing for trading posts. Sioux chief Wabashaw stated, “[Traders] save us a great deal of travelling and we wish a trader to be located on our lands”; NA, BIA, RG 75, “Documents Relating to Ratified and Unratified Treaties,” T494, roll 2, Minutes of Coun- cil held at Prairie du Chien, 7–16 July 1830. 10 Richard White writes, “The history of the northern and central American Great Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is far more compli- cated than the tragic retreat of the Indians in the face of an inexorable white advance. From the perspective of most northern and central plains tribes the crucial invasion of the plains during this period was not necessarily of the whites at all. These tribes had few illusions about American whites and the danger they presented, but the Sioux remained their most feared enemy”; White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65 (1978): 320. 11 Alanson Skinner, “Ethnology of the Ioway Indians,” Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee 5 (1926): 183–85. For further anthropological information, including creation stories, see “James Owen Dorsey Papers” group (4800), Anthropology Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Suit- land, MD, esp. subgroups 294 and 296. For an ethnohistory of the Iowa, see Martha Royce Blaine, The Iowa Indians (Norman, OK, 1979); Mildred Mott Wedel, “The Iowa Indians,” Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, book 1 (Washington, DC, 2001), 432–46; and Duane Anderson, “Ioway Ethnohistory: A Review,” part 1, Annals of Iowa 41 (1973): 1228–41; and part 2, Annals of Iowa 42 (1973): 41–59. 12 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of 95 of 120 Principal Chiefs from the Indian Tribes of North America (Philadel- phia, 1838), 146. 13 McCarter and English Indian Claims Cases, Princeton Collections of Western Americana (hereafter PCWA), docket 135, exhibit 18. 14 These investigations have interrogated the primacy of tribal allegiance in regional social structures. A particularly concise account of the inquiry can be found in Patricia Albers and Jeanne Kay, “Sharing the Land: A Study in American Indian Territoriality,” in A Cultural Geography of North American Indians, ed. Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore (Boulder, CO, 1987): “In order to understand American Indian territoriality it is necessary to look at

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land-use from a regional rather than tribally-based perspective, and to dis- tinguish between ideological claim to and the actual use of a specific territory. . . . In areas which have a history of multiple tribal use, the conditions of ‘sharing’ must be analyzed to determine what kinds of land-claims members of different tribes hold and on what basis these rights are being asserted. What are the sociopolitical bodies which hold land in common and are these groups always organized along single tribal lines? Can relationships, then, such as those based on kinship, manage land-rights independent of tribal allegiances?” (53). See also Patricia Albers, “Changing Patterns of Ethnicity in the Northeastern Plains, 1780–1870,” in History, Power, and Identity: Ethno- genesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Iowa City, 1996); and Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Envi- ronmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman, OK, 2001). 15 Albers, “Changing Patterns of Ethnicity.” 16 Ibid. 17 As quoted in Blaine, Iowa Indians, 26. 18 For a concise account of the U.S. fur trade, see David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840 (Lincoln, NE, 1979). 19 Blaine, Iowa Indians, 33. 20 See ibid., 53–61; and White, “Winning of the West,” 322. 21 See White, Middle Ground. For an interesting case study tracing the ravages of smallpox, see Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001). 22 PCWA box 39, folder 11, Anthony F. C. Wallace, “The Iowa and Sac-and-Fox Indians in Iowa and Missouri,” unpublished findings as expert witness before U.S. Claims Commission, October 1954, 17–21. 23 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Agency,” M234 R362, 14 December 1836. 24 Zachery Gussow, Sac, Fox, and Iowa Indians (New York, 1974), 36. 25 White, “Winning of the West,” 322. 26 Lt. James Gorrell, quoted in Blaine, Iowa Indians, 46. 27 See John C. Ewers, “Intertribal Warfare as the Precursor of Indian-White War- fare on the Northern Great Plains,” Western Historical Quarterly 4 (1975): 397–410. 28 White, “Winning of the West,” 325. 29 Frequently referred to as one tribe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Sac and the Fox, or Mesquakie, were autonomous peoples. See Michael Green, “We Dance in Opposite Directions: Mesquakie (Fox) Sepa- ratism from the Sac and Fox Tribe,” Ethnohistory 30 (1983): 129–40. It is also important to highlight Patricia Albers and Jeanne Kay’s assertion that protection was not the only reason for mergers. They argue that “the most compelling explanation of intertribal sharing of land and resources is that intertribal kinship ties, through intermarriage and adoption, were common” (“Sharing the Land,” 63). 30 Green, “We Dance,” 130. 31 Zebulon Montgomery Pike, An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi, and through the Western Parts of Louisiana, to the Arkansaw, Kans, La Platte, and Pierre Jaun Rivers: Performed by Order of the Government of the United States during the Years 1805, 1806, and 1807 (Philadelphia, 1810), 57.

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32 After the treaty of 1804, which transferred Sac rights to land east of the Mississippi, two factions emerged from the Mississippi Sac. One of these factions would ultimately be headed by Keokuk, who felt the tribe should move westward, onto Missouri Sac and Fox lands between the rivers, and the other led by Black Hawk, who demanded that the eight hundred residents of the primary Sac village, Saukenuk, be allowed to stay in their rightful homes. Black Hawk would later reminisce, “We were a divided people, forming two parties. Keokuk being at the head of one, willing to barter our rights merely for the good opinion of the whites; and cowardly enough to desert our village to them. I was at the head of another party, and was determined to hold on to my village, although I had been ordered to leave” (quoted in Jackson, Black- hawk, 107). Black Hawk’s sentiments notwithstanding, Keokuk’s strategy was ultimately more successful, as Black Hawk and his followers fought countless skirmishes with the U.S. Army in 1831 and 1832, culminating in the death or capture of his entire band at the Massacre of Bad Ax River in April 1832. These one-sided affairs, later to be known as the “Black Hawk Wars,” were little more than a small band of determined Sacs refusing to leave what they believed to be their land. The notoriety of this series of conflicts has shrouded the much more successful adaptation of both the Iowa and the band of Sacs headed by Keokuk. 33 Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vols. 1 and 2 (Wash- ington, DC, 1904), vol. 3 (1913); vol. 4 (1919), digital.library.okstate.edu/ kappler/index.htm. 34 Edwin Clarence Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 8 (Washington, DC, 1951), 76–80. 35 Ibid., 164–72. 36 We must recognize that “divisions” within tribes in the early years of the eighteenth century is a bit of a misnomer, as the U.S. government–created delineation of “tribe” had not gained importance in the Indian social structure of decentralized bands. Scholars now recognize that intertribal kinship ties and individual relationships of reciprocity played a significant, if not primary, factor in the political, social, and economic interactions of both Indians and whites at this time. Therefore, reports such as those by Indian Agent Nicolas Boilvin claiming that the “Ioway and Sacs were hostile towards each other” must not be taken as indications of full-fledged tribal warfare, but as probably false generalizations about the Iowa’s interactions with various parties of Rock River Sac who were not bound by the same ties of kinship as the Mis- souri Sac; Meriwether Lewis, Original Journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. 7 (Scituate, MA, 2001), 374; Blaine, Iowa Indians, 99. 37 Blaine, Iowa Indians, 109. 38 For a description of the continued violence in the region, see ibid., 113–26. 39 As Richard White explains in “Winning of the West,” the first decades of the nineteenth century were a prosperous time for the Western Sioux, as they took advantage of demographic, economic, and environmental changes brought about in the first stages of U.S. expansion. Similarly, Pekka Hämäläinen and Dan Flores have explored Western Comanche expansion in the same period. The Iowa’s diplomatic maneuvering exemplified the search for new political alliances many smaller Indian groups initiated as necessary responses to

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Lakota and Comanche expansion. See Hämäläinen, “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (1988): 485–513; and Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplo- macy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 465–85. For an excellent synthesis of U.S. expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on Five Hundred Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT, 1993). 40 PCWA, docket 135, exhibit 46, William Clark to Secretary of War, St. Louis, 18 October 1815. Original location unknown. 41 In addition to the protection they sought from the United States, the Iowa may have understood the 1815 treaty as an alliance of reciprocity. In an effort to maintain control of the valuable Mississippi and Missouri watersheds during the War of 1812, Americans provided various tribes in the region with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of goods; a select few chiefs, including Hard Heart of the Iowa, received peace medals that professed their status as leaders and their ability to negotiate with others of the same rank. Perhaps not coinci- dentally, Hard Heart’s is one of the fifteen signatures on the 1815 treaty. It is not hard to imagine that Hard Heart’s personal bonds of reciprocity with the Americans, established during the War of 1812, played a role in his decision to seek protection from the United States in 1815. See American State Papers, 38 vols. (Washington, DC, 1832–61), 2:7. 42 White, “Winning of the West,” 320. 43 David Meriwether, My Life in the Mountains and on the Plains, ed. Robert A. Griffen (Norman, OK, 1965), 44–47. 44 Paul Wilhelm (Duke of Württemberg), Travels in North America, 1822–1824, ed. Savoie Lottinville, trans. W. Robert Nitske (Norman, OK, 1973), 302. 45 Meriwether, My Life, 44–47; PCWA box 39, folder 11. Wallace, Iowa and Sac- and-Fox Indians, 14–39. 46 Edwin Clarence Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 15, (Washington, DC, 1951), 562–64. 47 Wilhelm, Travels in North America, 316. 48 For Lewis and Clark’s interaction with Indian groups, see James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln, NE, 1984). 49 Wishart, Fur Trade, 46–47. 50 Ibid. 51 PCWA, docket 158, exhibit 23. Original citation in Chicago Historical Society, N. Boilvin to William Eustis, Secretary of War, 2 February 1811. 52 For an excellent account of Indian mining in the region, see Murphy, Gather- ing of Rivers. 53 PCWA, docket 138, exhibit 75. Original citation in Saint Louis Gazette, 14 May 1814, p. 3, col. 3. 54 McKenney and Hall, Biographical Sketches, 143. On this trip, White Cloud sat for a portrait by Charles Bird King as part of McKenney and Hall’s portrait gallery. Attesting to the diplomatic importance of the Iowa, 9 of the 121 “principal chiefs” depicted in the gallery were Iowa, three more than the Sioux. According to the accompanying biographical sketch, White Cloud’s grimace was due to a broken arm he sustained after falling out of a window. 55 Blaine, Iowa Indians, 142.

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56 Charles J. Kappler, Treaty with the Iowa, 1824, digital.library.okstate.edu/ kappler/Vol2/treaties/iow0208.htm. 57 Blaine, Iowa Indians, 145. 58 In 1955, the U.S. Indian Claims Commission finally decided on the annuities due each tribe. Most of the proceedings centered on the question of historic territorial control, with the 1825 treaty playing an important role. 59 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes, 215–16; cited in Blair, Indian Tribes, 356–57. 60 Kappler, Treaty with the Iowa, 1824, arts. 2 and 3. 61 Maximilian (Prince of Wied), “Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832– 34,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 (Cleveland, 1906), 262–63. 62 PCWA, docket 138, exhibit 94. Original, Records of the War Department, U.S. Army Commands, Sixth Infantry, Letters Sent Book, 1824–33, Major Ketchum to General Atkinson, 31 March 1827. 63 PCWA, Material Available to Support Allegations in Petition Relating to Lands in Western Iowa and Northeast Mississippi. Original, Treaty Commis- sioner to Secretary of War, 16 July 1830. 64 G. J. Garrahan, The Jesuits of the Middle United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1938): 147–69. 65 Ibid. 163. Though I was unable to find the reference, Blaine describes a scene in which the boys “cried, ashamed they had to do women’s work” (Iowa Indians, 145). 66 For further reading on gender relations in the region, see Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, eds., The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women (Washington, DC, 1983); and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, “Autonomy and the Economic Roles of Indian Women of the Fox-Wisconsin River Region, 1763– 1832,” in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker (New York, 1995). 67 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R747, Clark to Agency Farmer, April 1827. 68 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R749, Clark to Secretary of War, 14 November 1829. 69 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Documents Relating to Ratified and Unratified Treaties,” T494, roll 2, Minutes of Council Held at Prairie du Chien, 7–16 July 1830. 70 Ibid. 71 Charles J. Kappler, Treaty with the Sauk, Fox, etc., 1830, digital.library.okstate .edu/kappler/Vo2/treaties/iow0208.htm. 72 “Half-breeds” and métis had been important members of the tribe since French traders came into the region. Unions between Indian women and French men were used by both parties to cement ties of reciprocity and maintain social status. In the 1842 census, both Dorion and Rubideaux were common last names, evidence of the frequent unions between Iowas and the famous French traders. For more on the importance of Indian women in the fur trade, see Clara Sue Kidwell, “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory 39 (1992): 97–107; and Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA, 2001).

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73 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by Office of the BIA,” M21 R12, Hughes to Secretary of War Cass, 12 April 1834. 74 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent, Great Nemaha Agency,” Hughes to William Clark, 20 November 1834. 75 Kappler, Treaty with the Iowa, etc., 1836, digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/ Vol2/treaties/iow0208.htm. 76 PCWA, docket 153, exhibit 162. Original, NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Received, Great Nemaha,” Hughes to Clark, 26 August 1837. 77 PCWA, docket 138, exhibit 153, Original, NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Received, Great Nemaha,” H-62 Document A, 1837. 78 PCWA, docket 138, exhibit 155, Original, NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Received, Great Nemaha,” H-62 Document B, 1837. 79 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Documents Relating to Ratified and Unratified Treaties,” T494, roll 3, Journal of Proceedings at Council, 7 October 1837; for archeological claims, see Mildred Mott, “The Relation of Historic Indian Tribes to Archaeological Manifestations in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 36 (1962): 227–314; and Mildred Mott Wedel, “Indian Villages on the Upper Iowa River,” Palimpsest 47 (1961): 561–92. 80 Since the late 1980s, maps and the process of mapping have come to be understood as more than just the objective representation of reality. Cartographic historians, and also some historians, have illustrated how maps can be used as tools of control by empires and expanding nation-states. Gregory Nobles wrote in 1993 that maps “represent an attempt not just to depict or define the land but to claim and control it, to impose a human and, more important, political order over it”; Nobles, “Straight Lines and Stability: Mapping the Political Order of the Anglo-American Frontier,” Journal of American History 80 (1993): 9–35. See also Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., “Americans versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making, and Native Americans,” Indi- ana Magazine of History 84 (1988): 91–108; Ken G. Brealey, “Mapping Them ‘Out’: Euro-Canadian Cartography and the Appropriation of the Nuxalk and Ts’ilhqot’in First Nations’ Territories, 1793–1916,” Canadian Geographer 39 (1995): 140–56; Brian J. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26 (1989): 1–20; and Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (New York, 1988). However, while European maps have come under close scrutiny as documents of power and political control, American Indian maps are often relegated to the role of apolitical cultural artifacts. In this case, Notchininga’s Map has been analyzed primarily as a document of tribal memory, not for its political import. See, e.g., Malcolm G. Lewis, “Indian Maps: Their Place in the His- tory of Plains Cartography,” in Mapping the North American Plains: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Frederick C. Luebke, Frances W. Kaye, and Gary E. Moulton (Norman:, OK, 1987); and Mark Warhus, Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land (New York, 1997). 81 The increase in the study of indigenous cartography is due in large part to the work of Malcolm G. Lewis. See, e.g., Lewis, ed., Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago, 1989). 82 Barbara Belyea, “Inland Journeys, Native Maps,” in ibid., 141.

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83 An example of a map in which the scale is dependent on the viewer’s point of view is the famous Saul Steinberg illustration “A View of the World from Ninth Avenue,” published as the cover of the 29 March 1976 New Yorker. 84 David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories, Science Is an Atlas (Chicago, 1989), 23. 85 William Green, untitled article on Iowa Map of 1837, An Atlas of Early Maps of the American Midwest, part 2, compiled by W. Raymond Wood. Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, vol. 29 (Springfield, IL, 2001). 86 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Documents Relating to Ratified and Unratified Treaties,” T494, roll 3, Journal of Proceedings at Council, 7 October 1837. 87 Ibid. 88 Blaine, Iowa Indians, 169. 89 PCWA, docket 153, exhibit 175. Original, NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Received, Great Nemaha 1837,” Dougherty to Clark, 30 May 1838. 90 Charles J. Kappler, Treaty with the Iowa, 1838, digital.library.okstate.edu/ kappler/Vol2/treaties/iow0208.htm. 91 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R751, Hughes to Clark, 24 August 1837; PCWA, docket 79–A, exhibit 44. Original, Joseph F. Moffette, The Territories of Kansas and Nebraska (New York, 1855), 73. 92 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M234 R307, Dougherty to Pilcher. 93 PCWA, docket 153, exhibit 175. Original, NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” 1837, Dougherty to Clark, 30 May 1838. 94 Samuel M. Irvin, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Wash- ington, DC, 1845). Irvin blames this group, known as the “Pouting Party,” for a rash of thefts and cattle killing in 1844. Probably headed by Big Neck, the group “broke off eight years ago . . . and rejoined these [other Iowas] last spring, and their influence has been decidedly pernicious.” 95 George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (Minneapolis, 1965), 22. 96 By the end of the 1830s, while some of the Iowa men had shown interest in plowing, most of the planting and harvesting work was still done by women. When the Presbyterian missionary Rev. Samuel Irvin joined the tribe on the Great Nemaha in 1837, however, he began a new push to involve men more in farming. In addition to a surplus of crops, Ballard’s 1842 report also noted that there were “twelve or thirteen men who labour among these squaws during the cropping season”; Pryor Plank, “The Iowa, Sac and Fox Indian Mis- sion and Its Missionaries, Rev. Samuel M. Irvin and His Wife,” Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society 10, 1907–8 (Topeka, KS, 1908); NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R752, 16 August 1842. 97 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R752, 16 August 1842. 98 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M234 R307, Dougherty to Pilcher. 99 PCWA box 39, folder 11. Wallace, Iowa and Sac-and-Fox Indians, 74. Rather

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than a catastrophic death toll, Wallace suggests the severe drop in Sac num- bers was in fact a dispersion into many smaller villages, making an accurate census impossible. 100 Pike, Account of Expeditions, 57. 101 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the St. Louis Superintendency,” M234 R753, 16 September 1842. 102 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Agency,” M234 R307, Dougherty to Clark, 31 May 1838. 103 I use the term “traditional” in the most general sense: an accepted practice from some time in the past, rather than a characteristic of a timeless and unchanging way of life. 104 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC, 1844), 65. 105 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M 234 R307, Annual Report of Sub-Agent Richardson, 16 September 1842. 106 Diary of Samuel Irvin, Kansas State Historical Society; NA, BIA, RG 75, “Let- ters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M 234 R307, Richardson to Pilcher, 7 October 1843. 107 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M 234 R308, Vaughn to Harvey, 1 June 1848. 108 29th Congress, 2nd sess., Sen. Doc. 1 (serial 493), 371. 109 Later in the same report Irvin complains, “The chiefs claim control of the money. . . . In this way the chiefs secure the influence of the braves, and the braves in return sustain the chiefs.” Unlike the emergence of marked status distinctions among the Comanche and Kiowa in the early nineteenth century, which Hämäläinen argues caused so much disruption to the tribes’ social fabric, the continuation of a fixed caste system may have helped the Iowa adapt to U.S. expansion; NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by the Great Nemaha Superintendency,” M 234 R307, 28 September 1843, 2 October 1843; Hämäläinen, “Western Comanche Trade Center.” Regarding the Iowa’s strict caste system in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Alanson Skinner writes: “The social system of the Ioway was founded firmly on caste, rank, being accorded to birth or, quite secondarily, according to achievement. These cleavages were very important in their social and ceremonial life, and are even reflected in their folklore and mythology. Probably nowhere in North America, unless it may have been among the Natchez or on the Northwest Coast, were social classes more strongly emphasized. When at the height of their power, the Ioway must have been wealthy, for an Indian tribe, and personal property must have accumulated to the point of cumbersomeness, when one considers the extraordinary number of Ioway societies and cults, to a number of which each tribesmen of importance belonged. Each of these clubs had its own prescribed paraphernalia and often a special costume. In the extraordinary profusion of these associations, the Ioway far outstrip any of their Central Algonkian associates”; Skinner, “Ethnology of the Ioway Indians,” 183–85, 190. 110 Lewis Henry Morgan, The Indian Journals, 1859–62, ed. Leslie A. White (Ann Arbor, MI, 1959). 111 See Brian W. Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln, NE, 1990).

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112 George Catlin, Notes on Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe (Water- loo Place, London, 1844), iv. 113 NA, BIA, RG 75, “Letters Sent by Office of Indian Affairs St. Louis Super- intendency,” M234 R748, Subsistence of a Council with the Ioways at the Great Nemaha Sub-Agency, September 1841. 114 Throughout the nineteenth century, many Iowas continued to emulate aspects of Euro-American society as individual farms began to replace village plots. The last large-scale hunt occurred in 1863, and cattle and hogs were seen with regularity on the reservation. By 1876, some Iowas began working for non-Indians, and many were becoming proficient in English. While many of those Iowas who identified with the old ways and opposed allotment in sev- eralty moved to a new reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) between 1878 and 1881, the rest of the tribe successfully resisted the removal acts of 1885 and 1887 and stayed on the Great Nemaha, where their reservation remains. Today over 2,100 Iowas live on the reservation initially created in 1837; Wedel, Handbook of North American Indians, 442.

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