The American Indian in the United States, Period 1850-1914 / ... The Present Condition of the American Indian; His Political History and Other Topics; A Plea for Justice

by Warren K. Moorehead

CHAPTER IV. THE OJIBWA OF MINNESOTA

The Ojibwa commonly known as Chippewa, constitute one of the great divisions of the Algonkin stock. We shall have much to say concerning their ethnology, in a subsequent volume. But following the scope accepted for this book, we shall treat of the Ojibwa as one of the great Indian tribes (numerically), at the present time and one much “advanced” along the white man’s trail.

The year 1850 found the Ojibwa, or Chippewa, Indians located as they are at the present time, with some exceptions. A few in Wisconsin and on the shores of Lake Superior; some at Turtle Mountain in North Dakota, but most of them living in the State of Minnesota at Leech Lake, White Earth, Red Lake and Cass Lake. The number of these Indians in the year 1851 was about 28,000. In 1884 the entire number is given as 16,000. In 1905, the “Handbook of American Indians” estimates that there are 15,000 in British America and 17,144 in the United States.

Those who wish to trace the migrations, and study the interesting customs and folklore of these people would do well to consult an interesting book written by an Ojibwa, Mr. William W. Warren. The manuscript of this work was prepared between 1850 and 1853. Warren’s mother was three-fourths Ojibwa and his father a white man. He died of tuberculosis June 1, 1853, and the Minnesota Historical Society did not publish his history of the nation until 1885. Clearly, Warren was the most prominent of later-day Ojibwa; he had served in the Minnesota Legislature, and he was possessed of a brilliant mind and would doubtless have made his mark in the world had he lived.

In the early ’50’s and ’60’s a few of the fur companies still did business in northern Minnesota. It was no uncommon sight to see the “Red River ox carts” bringing supplies into northern Minnesota, or carrying loads of furs to the nearest Hudson Bay post, in the Red River valley to the north. The Ojibwa came in contact with the French-Canadian element during the activities of the fur trade, and had little in common with, or met few Americans, until white settlers from the East increased in numbers in the State of Minnesota.

While this and the succeeding chapter are confined chiefly to White Earth, a description of Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations should not be omitted.

HONORABLE GABE E. PARKER, CHOCTAW
Registrar of the United States Treasury.

The Ojibwa Indians living on Red Lake have not been allotted, but hold their land in common. The pine timber possessed by them is valued at several million dollars. Most of the cabins are grouped about the shores of Red Lake, and the Indians while not well-to-do, are far from pauperism. It has not been necessary to ration them as in the case of White Earth, where the Superintendent, Major John R. Howard, last winter fed 762 Indians. The reasons for this are set forth in succeeding pages.

The Ojibwa at Leech Lake have valuable white pine, but this has been cut under Government supervision and the dreadful scandals occurring at White Earth have been avoided. At Leech Lake, Red Lake, and Cass Lake, the Indians live by working in the lumber camps, agriculture, fishing, and some serve in other branches of industry. They have, however, depended entirely too much upon interest payments made by the Government. Much of the educating, training and support of these Indians is paid for by the interest accruing to the Indian on a fund of several million dollars in the United States Treasury and belonging to the Ojibwa of Minnesota. It has been pointed out by other observers, and emphasized in addresses at Lake Mohonk and elsewhere, that this fund is a curse rather than a blessing. The mixed-blood element, controlled by a few shrewd French-Canadians, wish to secure possession of it; attorneys are attracted by its presence; the young men and women, in some cases, will not work since they expect to be supported out of the fund. It should be divided up per capita among the Indians. The Government should control, or supervise, the portions belonging to Indians known to be incompetent or drunkards, and instead of paying them money, give them groceries and clothing until their portion of the fund is exhausted. Councils should be called on all reservations, or at central points, on allotment groups, and the Indians made to understand that with the payment of this money, responsibility on the part of the United States ceases,—excepting in the case of incompetents, referred to above.

With the dreadful lesson of White Earth, staring everyone in the face, it is incomprehensible that Red Lake should be allotted, and the timber issued to the Indians. Yet there was a determined effort to bring about such a result, and it was only through opposition of the Indian Office, and Inspector E. B. Linnen and others that the steal was prevented.

The Indians live in frame and log dwellings. The birch-bark wigwam is rare—save for summer residence. Ordinary “store clothes” are worn by all persons. The birch-bark canoe still persists, and there are some survivals of ancient customs. Such a majority of the people speak English and live like the lower classes of Caucasians, that the bands may be considered less Indian than the Sioux, and much less primitive than the Navaho. The photographs prove this statement.

Let us look backward and compare conditions of the ’80’s and of 1905–’12.

Rev. Joseph A. Gilfillan was a missionary in northern Minnesota for twenty-five years. He became entirely familiar with the Ojibwa language and spoke it fluently. He is a quiet, modest man. The Indians told me of numbers of heroic actions on his part during the twenty-five years he labored in and about White Earth reservation. During the spring of one year, when the ice on the lake was breaking up, two white men were in a most perilous situation, and although there were larger and stronger men standing about, no one would venture out to save the lives of the unfortunates. Gilfillan went out—although he frequently broke through the ice—and managed to bring both men ashore.

BUILDINGS PINE POINT, WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA
Built and formerly occupied by Rev. James Gilfillan as a school. Now used as Government School.

On another occasion, he was held up by several armed men, sent out by the mixed-blood and French-Canadian element, who opposed his missionary labors. In fact, one of the men presented a gun and threatened to shoot him if he continued in his determination to preach to the Indians that Sunday. The above incidents (and more could be related) give an idea of the character of this worthy man. He has never been engaged in any of the disputes regarding the deplorable situation among the Minnesota Ojibwa, and it required considerable urging on my part to persuade him to testify before the Congressional Investigation Committee of which Honorable James Graham was Chairman.

Rev. Gilfillan, largely at his own expense, built splendid schoolhouses, missions and chapels at Pine Point, White Earth and Twin Lakes. His mission was successful and he had at one time several hundred Indians in attendance in both school and church, and a corps of efficient workers. I think it is correct to state that there were more church members on White Earth reservation during Gilfillan’s administration than at the present time. Certainly the moral tone was far above that which obtains today. It is sad to relate that Gilfillan’s missions were discontinued, and the buildings where he devoted so many years of unselfish labor were taken over by the United States Government at far less than their actual value.

Rev. Gilfillan’s statement made to me, and accepted by the Congressional Committee[^[9]] and published in their report is as follows:—

Washington, D. C., Dec. 9, 1910

“Hon. Warren K. Moorehead,

Andover, Mass.

“My dear Sir: Your favor of 8th instant has just reached me, and it gives me pleasure to answer your inquiries. The first is, ‘While there was much suffering when you were missionary at White Earth, Pine Point, Twin Lakes, etc., is it not your opinion that there was less swindling than at the present time?’

“In answer I would say that I do not consider there was any suffering at all to speak of from June, 1873, when I went there, till along toward 1898, when I left. The Indians raised garden produce; many had fine fields of wheat. They could gather all the wild rice they wanted to; fish were abundant. Some of the men made two or three hundred dollars by the muskrat hunt each spring. They made a good deal by furs. Some hunters killed as many as forty deer in a winter. They made maple sugar. They had all the berries they could gather. From all these varied sources they made a good living. They had unlimited fuel at their doors. They were rent free. I have heard people say, and I believe it, that there was not nearly so much poverty or suffering as in a white city, where the poor have only one resource—wages. If they had wished to raise a little more vegetables, as potatoes, corn, etc., they could have lived on the fat of the land. They were in those days happy, peaceful, and contented communities. To the above-enumerated sources of income of theirs I omitted to mention that there passed through my hands for them, given by the Episcopal mission, more than $130,000 in money for all imaginable purposes—from spectacles to building churches for them and supporting their children in schools. There were several thousand dollars’ worth of clothing sent me for them by charitable people. There was no crime during the twenty-five years I was there, although for many years there was not even Indian police. There was no instance of holdup or robbery, not to speak of greater offenses. Life and property were absolutely safe—far safer than in any white community I know. None of them would ever have thought of molesting anyone. They were in those days happy, peaceful, harmless people. As to how the present state contrasts with that, you have been out there lately and know better than I.

“As to your second question, whether there was less swindling than at the present time, I would say that then there was none at all. The Indians had no lands to sell; no property of any kind except their little patches of gardens, their little furs, wild rice, etc. There was nothing to tempt the cupidity of the white man. As to how that contrasts with the present, you have been out there and know better than I.

“But I ought to qualify this by saying that for some years in the nineties there was a great deal of swindling from them unwittingly perpetrated by the Government, for an account of which I refer you to my inclosed printed statement made to Mohonk Conference in 1898, which you will find on Page [13] of the inclosed pamphlet. And that you may know that the statements made therein are true, I may inform you that the then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hon. William Jones, who went to the ground and personally investigated, endorsed upon that statement: ‘I find that the statements herein made by Mr. Gilfillan are in the main correct.’ This indorsement does not appear on the copy I send you, but is on other copies. To briefly specify the heads under which this swindling was done: it was; First, by billeting upon them three Chippewa commissioners at $39 a day for the three, making with their clerks, etc., $88 a day, the Indians said; said commissioners being mostly politicians out of a job, and their positions almost sinecures. Secondly, by repeated farcical ‘estimating’ of their pine; three several ‘estimations’ (pretended), covering a period of perhaps nine years; two of said estimations costing $360,000, and then done dishonestly in the interests of those who bought the pine, whereas the real worth of the work, done honestly, was only $6,000. Thirdly, by cutting green pine, but paying for it as ‘dead and down’ pine, so getting for it seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars a thousand. But most destructive of all was the swindling done by fire; the timber being fired to allow of its being cut as ‘dead and down’ and paid for at seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars. It was a pitiful sight to see those magnificent pine forests, where I used to ride for seventy miles on a stretch through great pine woods, shapely and tall, the trees reaching up, it seemed, 100 feet, that, like the buffalo, could never be replaced, now all blackened and scarred, killed and dead. The glory of the State of Minnesota was gone when in the nineties her magnificent pine forests that covered so large an area of her northern part were fired to get the Indians’ pine for seventy-five cents a thousand.

“Now, as to your next question, whether there was more drinking among the Indians then than now. I am glad to say that for many years after 1873, when I first knew them, there was, one may say, no drinking among the Indians. The mixed-bloods, who were mostly French-Canadian mixed bloods, always drank a little, but the Indians were remarkably free from it. The White Earth Indians lived twenty-two miles from the railroad, the nearest place where they could get liquor; they were almost that distance from the nearest white men. The Red Lake Indians were one hundred miles from the railroad, the Cass Lake one hundred, the Leech Lake seventy miles. They were almost as far from any white men, except the Government employees and the missionaries. So they were secluded from the white man and his vices. But the great reason of their immunity was the missions. The influence of the Gospel and the church in their secluded position kept them safe. It is no reflection on the White Earth Indians to say that in the place from which they had been removed in 1868—Crow Wing—they had fallen most dreadfully under the dominion of the ‘firewater,’ both men and women. They were in a most dreadful state of degradation from that cause. But never was the power of the Gospel more signally shown than in their cleansing and renovation on the White Earth reservation. I never saw a drunken Indian nor even one that I thought had tasted liquor. They had become communicants of the church, had their family prayers, their weekly prayer meetings from house to house, where they exhorted each other to steadfastness in the Christian life. What had such a people to do with liquor? Some of them, who at Crow Wing had been in the lowest depths, told me that they had not tasted liquor in twenty years, others for other periods; and I know they told the truth. Among all the chiefs, numbering perhaps twenty, on White Earth Reservation, there was just one who drank, and he, I am informed, had the liquor supplied to him by a mixed-blood, who, in payment, got him to swing the Indians to his schemes.

OJIBWA, BLIND, FROM TRACHOMA, PINE POINT, WHITE EARTH RESERVATION, MINNESOTA

“But into this fair garden of temperance Satan drew his shining trail and toward the last years of my residence there sadly marred it. It was found that much money could be made out of Indians drinking, and it soon grew up into a most profitable industry. It came about in this way: Congress, as everybody knows, passed a law that liquor should not be sold or given to Indians. A set of men arose who saw the money there was in that; they arrested Indians who had taken a drink, or as witnesses, took them to St. Paul or Duluth, fiddled with them a little, and then presented a bill of $400, I believe, to the Government for each Indian, which money was paid, and they divided it up among them. The Indians had all the whisky they wanted while under the care of these deputy marshals, as they were called; they kept drunk while with them, and they brought plenty of liquor home with them to the reservations when they returned. They did not want to stop the Indians drinking; they encouraged it; the more drinking the more cases and the more money for them. This was found so profitable that it grew to a monstrous height. Once they had, it was said, every adult male Indian on the White Earth Reservation in St. Paul in whisky cases, a distance of, say 240 miles, and for every one of these men they got perhaps $400. The most of the deputy marshals who made the arrests were French-Canadian mixed-bloods of the lowest character, nearly all of whom openly and frankly drank themselves, though in the eyes of the law Indians like the Indians they arrested; and a high official of the United States Government told the writer that one of those half-breeds made $5,000 a year out of it, as much, perhaps, as the salaries of the members of the Cabinet of the United States Government. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars or how many millions they got out of the Government by this swindle under the form of law it would be interesting to know. Some of those mixed-bloods worked that gold mine for eighteen years. The loss of so much money to the Government was pitiful, but not half so pitiful as the terrible demoralization of the Indians by the operations of those men. Here again the good intentions of the Government in passing that law, that liquor must not be given or sold to Indians, was turned into death and destruction to them, and became most bitter gall in its carrying out by the agents of the Government to enrich themselves.

“So the answer to your question as to whether the Indians drank more then or now must be that in the early years after 1873, when there was just one honest white deputy marshal named Nichols, they drank practically none at all, most of them never tasting it for years; but that later, after the swarm of mixed-blood deputy marshals arose, there was much drinking under the manipulation of those men, restrained, however, by their very great lack of money, for at that time none of them had got any.

“As to your other question, namely, the relative healthfulness of the Indians then and now, I would say that there was always much tuberculosis among them, owing to their crowding into one-room cabins, heated very hot in the winter, without ventilation; and if there was one tubercular patient, that one was spitting over everything, so that if there was one sick in a family he or she almost necessarily communicated the infection to everyone who was infectible. They say that formerly, when they lived practically in the open air, winter and summer, in their birch-bark wigwams, though in a 40–degrees-below-zero temperature in winter, and lived on a flesh diet, that consumption was unknown among them; but in the transition state, when shut up in the one-room cabin, living on salt pork and heavy bread, and in many other unsanitary ways, the ravages of consumption have been serious. Whether worse now than in the days from 1873 to 1898 I do not know. I only remember a few who had sore eyes, which I suppose was trachoma, in those days.

“Believe me, very respectfully yours,

“J. A. Gilfillan”

There has always been a conflict between the full-bloods and mixed-bloods of Minnesota, and especially at White Earth reservation. This dates from the migration of a number of mixed-blood Indians (chiefly French-Canadian) from Canada. They have caused no end of trouble, and by clever manoeuvering dominated the councils.

The favorite chief of the entire Ojibwa nation was Hole-in-the-Day. He became war chief in 1846. The Indians talk of him even at the present day, and the story of Ojibwa, presented towards the end of this book, will be found of interest in this connection.

The Indians told me, during the investigation of 1909, who were responsible for the murder of this fine old chief, but they were unwilling to testify, fearing the vengeance of the French-Canadian element. The following interesting communication, from one in authority, clears up the murder of Hole-in-the-Day, and explains the hostility between the scheming mixed-bloods, and the honest, although ignorant full-bloods.

INDIAN SCHOOL CHILDREN IN UNIFORM, PINE POINT WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA

“During the summer of 1912 Mr. James T. Shearman was detailed by the Honorable Secretary of the Interior to secure testimony concerning the eighty-six mixed-blood Indians suspended from the White Earth rolls. At this hearing certain testimony was given that may be of interest to you, as it explains the assassination of the then head chief of all the Chippewas, Hole-in-the-Day, who was killed at Crow Wing by a party of Leech Lake Indians in 1886. At this hearing an old, blind Indian testified that Clement Beaulieu, father of Gus Beaulieu, Albert Fairbanks, uncle of Ben Fairbanks, and certain other mixed-bloods employed him and other Indians then living at Leech Lake to go to Crow Wing and kill Chief Hole-in-the-Day, agreeing to pay the Indians $2000 for the deed. They went to Crow Wing and killed him according to agreement. Later, when the mixed-bloods refused to pay the price agreed upon, they organized another party and came to White Earth, intending to kill Beaulieu and certain other mixed-blood families. Upon their arrival here they were induced by the present Head Chief, Me-zhuck-ke-ge-shig, who was related to one of the party, to return to Leech Lake. After this old, blind Indian finished his story, Me-zhuck-ke-ge-shig, now about ninety years of age, went upon the stand and confirmed the testimony of the former witness. Mr. Shearman’s report is probably on file in the Secretary’s office, and I am informed that a brief of the testimony was made by Mr. E. C. O’Brien of the Department of Justice, and you can probably obtain a copy of the same.

“Since Mr. Shearman was here on the matter referred to, I have been furnished additional testimony concerning the killing of Hole-in-the-Day. It appears that the party left Leech Lake under the pretext of going hunting, there being nine in the party, and that only four of them were in the plot to kill Hole-in-the-Day. When they got to the Crow Wing country May-dway-we-mind said: “Hole-in-the-Day dies today.” Later, they met him about a mile and a half from the Crow Wing Agency at a branch of the two roads, where he was killed. After the deed was done, one of the party named Ay-nah-me-ay-gah-bow asked why he had been killed. The answer was that they were told to do it and that there was a reward for killing him, that each one of the party was to get a thousand dollars and a nice house built for him, and the one who shot first was to take Hole-in-the-Day’s place as Head Chief. The man who asked the first question also asked who offered the reward and he was told that Clement Beaulieu (father of Gus H. Beaulieu), Albert Fairbanks (uncle of Ben L. Fairbanks), ——[^[10]] with others, were the men.

“Me-zhuck-ke-gwon-abe or Jim Bassett also stated that about four years after the killing he came with May-dway-we-mind, Num-ay-we-ne-nee, Way-zow-e-ko-nah-yay, O-didh-quay-ge-shig and Day-dah-tub-aun-gay to White earth for the money that had been offered as a reward and which they did not obtain.

“It is a matter of history that Hole-in-the-Day was opposed to the admission of the mixed-bloods to this reservation and that he was killed at their instigation, and there has been irrepressible friction between these Indians ever since.”