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The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America pp 77–89Cite as

Scrip and the Taking of the Minnesota Half Breed Tract

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Abstract

By the early 1850s, pressure to take control of the Minnesota Half Breed Tract had proved irresistible. Politically connected speculators looking for ways to carve up and sell off the land, unable to acquire land through treaty negotiations, looked to a refinement of an earlier land allocation mechanism: a financial security similar to the land warrants issued to ex-soldiers for land for so-called military bounty lands in Illinois, Arkansas and Missouri. The effect was to transform land into a kind of financial asset rather than a good to be acquired by labor or by virtue of “discovery.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Letter from Iaton, Otoe chief, Mah-che-gi-suq, of the Missourias, Big Elk, of the Omaha and Little Dish, of the Sioux to William Clark, 15 October 1836, William Clark Papers, vol. G, p. 27, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kans; Treaty of Prairie du Chien (15 July 1830), 7 Stat. 328, Article 10. “Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs”, March 15, 1836, Senate Document 246, 24th Congress, 1st session, p. 5.

  2. 2.

    Treaty of 5 May 1838, National Archives, Office of Indian Affairs, Council Bluff Agency, C-711. For the role of scrip in the dispossession of the Choctaw, Ojibwe, Pawnee and Ponca see Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, November 28 1849, p. 39; Peter Pitchlynn’s memorial, Report of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, February 15 1859, Senate Report No. 374, pp. 9, 15–16; Half Breed Scrip, Chippewas of Lake Superior, Correspondence and Action, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872) Choctaw Nation v. United States, 119 U.S. 1 at 7 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1886); “Land Scrip Issued by the Indian Office,” Report of the Commissioner, Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), p. 69; Gustav Brohough, Sioux and Chippewa Half Breed Scrip and Its Application to the Minnesota Pinelands (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1906); David J. Wishart, “The Dispossession of the Pawnee,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 69, No. 3 (September, 1979), pp. 383, 384.

  3. 3.

    Joseph Story’s comment is in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Little Brown, 1873) p. 128 (first published 1833); Johnson’s comment on Kentucky land titles is in Green v. Biddle, 21 US (8 Wheat.) 1, at 100 (U.S. Supreme Court, 1823), the Kentucky legislature’s declaration on property rights is in Acts of Kentucky, 30th General Assembly, Frankfort, 1821, pp. 45–46 and Blackstone’s is in his Commentaries, pp. 214, 216. The 1732 Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in His Majesty’s Plantations and Colonies in America, allowed land and houses to be seized to repay debts in a way not possible in England, as discussed in Claire Priest, ‘Creating an American Property Law: Alienability and Its Limits in American History’, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2006, p. 389.

  4. 4.

    Dougherty to Clark, 29 May 1839, William Clark Papers, Kansas Historical Society, vol. G, p. 118 (microfilm reel MF 3116).; Senate Executive Journal, 25th Congress, 3rd session (28 January 1839), p. 185. Dougherty to Senators Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Linn, 10 December 1838, cited in Berlin B. Chapman, The Otoes and the Missourias, A Study of Indian Removal and the Legal Aftermath, Oklahoma City, 1965, p. 56; Isaac McCoy to Sen. John C. Spencer, 22 December 1841, National Archives, Office of Indian Affairs, Misc. N 267–842.

  5. 5.

    The Sioux bands gave up their land (basically, everything west of the Mississippi river and north of Iowa’s Skunk River, stretching off indefinitely into the Dakotas) in return for a $220,000 cash payment and a promise to pay annuities in cash, goods and services of $58,000 a year for fifty years. Treaty of Mendota, (5 August 1851) 10 Stat 954. They were granted a twenty-mile by fifty-mile reservation.

  6. 6.

    Crawford to Poinsett, February 27 1840, cited in Manypenny to McClelland, in “Sioux Lands or Reservation in Minnesota Territory,” Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives Made During the First session of the Thirty-third Congress, Washington, 1854, vol. 2, Report 138. p. 7; Crawford to Poinsett, January 7 1839, Ibid., p. 4.

  7. 7.

    Manypenny to McClelland, March 4 1854 in “Sioux Lands,” p. 10.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., p. 11.

  9. 9.

    Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, editor, History of Wabasha County, Minnesota, Winona, 1920, pp. 21–22; “Sioux Lands,” p. 10; Session Laws of the Territory of Minnesota, St. Paul, 1854, pp. 126–127.

  10. 10.

    Henry Mower Rice to Henry H. Sibley 7 January, 1854, Sibley Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, cited in Gustav Brohough, Sioux and Chippewa Half Breed Scrip and Its Application to the Minnesota Pinelands, Madison, 1906, p. 31.

  11. 11.

    John Wilson to Rep. D.B. Wright, February 23 1854, reprinted in “Sioux Lands,” p. 13.

  12. 12.

    Warrants for Military Bounty Lands were the subject of repeated debate when Congress considered proposals for homestead acts and railroad grants in the 1850s and 1860s; Rep. Clement Vallandingham, an Ohio Democrat, highlighted his colleagues’ participation in the market in Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 134 (December 18 1861).

  13. 13.

    Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 1st session, pp. 1114, 1197 (May 5 and May 14 1854).

  14. 14.

    Ibid., p. 1114 (May 5 1854).

  15. 15.

    “Register of Sioux Half Breed Scrip Entries April 23 1857 to May 1 1861,” US General Land Office Red Wing Land District, Minnesota Historical Society, State Archives, Minneapolis. Brohough, Sioux and Chippewa Half Breed Scrip, pp. 51–58.

  16. 16.

    Treaty of LaPointe, 10 Stat. 1109, (September 30 1854) Article 7; Manypenny to Gilbert, June 15 1855, reprinted in Half Breed Scrip, Chippewas of Lake Superior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874) p. 37; William Watt Folwell, History of Minnesota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1922) Vol. 1, p. 470; Thomas Hendricks to Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland, February 23 1856 and Manypenny to McClelland, March 12 1856, both reprinted in Half Breed Scrip, p. 39.

  17. 17.

    Indian Affairs Commissioner William P. Dole to Secretary of the Interior J.P. Usher, March 25 1863, reprinted in Half Breed Scrip, p. 41.; Folwell, History of Minnesota, p. 471; Dana E. King, special commissioner, to Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, December 13 1872, reprinted in Half Breed Scrip, pp. 276–277.

References

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    David Ress

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Ress, D. (2019). Scrip and the Taking of the Minnesota Half Breed Tract. In: The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31467-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31467-5_6

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