Can you give me any information concerning her?
(Mrs.) F. H. Anderson,
Brooklyn, Wisconsin.
“Glory of the Morning” was an historical character, and one of the staff on the Wisconsin Historical Society related to Professor Leonard the incident on which he founded the play. He has taken poet’s license with certain parts—with the names, for instance, of the son and daughter; but in Wisconsin Historical Collections, VII, 345, you can read the story as told by a French-Canadian trader. “Glory of the Morning” was a Winnebago chieftess, and Jonathan Carver, when very old, saw her at her village near Menasha, Wisconsin. The French officer whose name was Sabrevoir Decorah (also spelled
DeCarrie, DesCarie, DeKaury, and other ways), came to Wisconsin probably during the Fox wars of the early eighteenth century. He married the daughter (“Glory of the Morning”) of the head chief of the tribe; resigned from the army, and became a trader. They had two sons and a daughter. When the French and Indian War began Decorah was summoned to become a soldier, and he took his daughter with him to be educated in Canada. The father was killed at the battle of Ste. Foye in 1760. The girl married a Montreal merchant and her son or grandson, Laurent Fily, came to Wisconsin as a trader and lived for many years with Augustin Grignon at Kaukauna. Many of his letters are in the Wisconsin Historical Library.
The two sons of the chieftess became chiefs of the tribe, and had many descendants. The Decorah family in the nineteenth century was the most powerful of the Winnebago families. Several of its members still live in Nebraska. Two years ago an educated Indian girl, teacher of art at Carlisle Indian School, visited Madison. Her maiden name was Angel Decorah, and she traced her lineage directly to “Glory of the Morning.” The Winnebago name of the chieftess was Hopokoékaw.
THE ODANAH INDIAN RESERVATION
Will you please give me some information concerning the reservation near Odanah, Wisconsin? I desire to learn the names of the chiefs who ceded the reservation and also the terms of the cession; what each member of the tribe is entitled to receive, and the address of the agent. I am entitled to the same per-capita allotment as other members of the tribe and this fact accounts for my interest in the matter. Please give me, therefore, a history of the reservation.
George Allen,
Bay Shore, Michigan.
The Chippewa of Lake Superior made a final cession of all their lands at a treaty held at La Pointe, September 30, 1844. In return for the cession, the government provided several reservations for the tribesmen. That at Bad River, of which the chief town is Odanah, comprises 124,333 acres of land. This land, at the time the reservation was set aside, was heavily timbered. The Indians were entitled to annuities for twenty years, and each head of a family or single person over twenty-one years of age had the right to eighty acres
of land. The chiefs who signed the treaty were members of the La Pointe band.