In the summer of 1848, with the help of traders and the military, the Winnebagoes, by this time sick of their bargain, were put on the road for their new home. Some did not start, others fell out by the way, but a majority of the twenty-five hundred souls were landed at Long Prairie. They liked the new home even less than they expected, and soon began to desert and scatter; some to encamp along the upper Mississippi, some to the neutral ground, others to their ancient country in Wisconsin; and a few are said to have wandered off to the Missouri. Wherever they went they were unwelcome, and the Indian office was flooded with complaints of their depredations and trespasses. Mr. Rice had traded with the Winnebagoes and had so attached them to himself that they had made him their sole commissioner to choose their new Minnesota home. His aid had been called in to persuade them to move. To him now the Whig commissioner of Indian affairs resorted to round up the vagrant Indians and corral them on their proper reservation. He agreed to pay Mr. Rice seventy dollars per head for the service. Meantime Governor Ramsey and Agent Fletcher were occupied with collecting the Indians below, and preparing to transport or march them northward without material expense to the government. Delegate Sibley was supposed to be the proper territorial organ at the seat of government. The feelings of these gentlemen may be imagined when they learned that the “infamous Rice contract,” of which they had not had the least knowledge or suspicion, had been concluded, and Mr. Rice’s agents were on the road. In vain did Governor Ramsey inform the commissioner that he had several hundred ready to march; in vain was Delegate Sibley’s “official protest” against a secret, unconscionable, insulting proceeding. A House committee of investigation exonerated the commissioner, but he took early occasion to resign his office. The point of interest to the Minnesota citizen was not the alleged excessive cost to the government, or the comfort of the Winnebagoes. He was concerned to know who had the greatest pull at Washington, and it appeared to him at the close that a certain private citizen of St. Paul, a Democrat, and not the Whig governor nor the Democratic delegate, was the man to “swing things” there.
In the fall of the same year (1850) came the regular election for delegate to succeed Mr. Sibley upon the expiration of his term. Mr. Rice, who had contested Mr. Sibley’s election in 1848 as delegate from Wisconsin,—with little vigor, however,—was too prudent to come out against one who had brought home the organic act, and made no opposition to Mr. Sibley’s unanimous election as delegate to the Thirty-first Congress, although he organized the democracy of the territory as if for a candidacy. Nor did he personally aspire to the office when Mr. Sibley’s first term was to expire. To defeat that gentleman he virtually dictated the Whig nominee, who had been useful in securing the Winnebago contract, and persuaded the regular Democratic nominee to retire on the eve of election in favor of the Whig candidate.
Mr. Sibley, although a Jeffersonian Democrat dyed in the wool, ran as a people’s candidate. The total vote was 1208; a transfer of 46 votes would have elected the Whig candidate. The accounts of historians, surviving citizens, and the newspapers of the day concur in pronouncing this political campaign the bitterest and most intensely personal ever known in Minnesota. Mr. Sibley’s opponents attacked him as the representative and tool of the American Fur Company, an ancient, shameless, intolerable monopoly. Party lines broke down, and the issue became “Fur versus Anti-Fur.”
Mr. Sibley served through the Thirty-first and Thirty-second Congresses with admirable efficiency. At one time objection was made against his active participation in general legislation, and the suggestion made that a delegate should confine himself to matters concerning his territory. Mr. Sibley replied that Minnesota was part of the United States, and that whatever concerned them concerned her, and claimed for her delegate the right to be heard, and all the more because he had no vote. The matter was dropped. He had little difficulty in obtaining for Minnesota the needful appropriations for her government expenses, roads, and public buildings, and the reservation in 1851 of two sections in each township for common schools, and of two townships of land for the endowment of a university. His most conspicuous act, in the highest degree creditable to him, although barren of results, was his effort to secure the passage of his bill to extend the laws of the land over the Indians. His speech of August 2, 1850, in which he denounced the rascality of the white man’s dealings with the natives, the absurdity of treating with them as separate nations, and their need of the protection of the law, is a splendid testimony to the intelligence and wisdom of the man who doubtless knew more about Indian affairs than any other man on the floor. He spoke to deaf ears. The government went on sowing to the wind, to reap the whirlwind.
Mr. Sibley was permitted to return to private life at the close of his second term and devote himself to closing up his relations with the American Fur Company, of which he had remained the head. Mr. Rice was selected to succeed him by a three fourths majority vote over Alexander Wilkin, his Whig opponent.
CHAPTER VII
TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT
The triumph of the Democratic party in the elections of 1852 was notice to all the appointive territorial officers of Minnesota that their days were numbered. On May 15, 1853, Governor Ramsey gave place to the Hon. Willis A. Gorman, and the Whig judges were succeeded by Messrs. William H. Welch, Andrew G. Chatfield, and Moses G. Sherburne.
The appointment of governor was a disappointment to the friends of Mr. Sibley, who felt that he had good right to aspire to the office. His connection with the now discredited fur company, and his failure to ally himself with the Democratic machine in Minnesota, left the President free to bestow the appointment on some one who had done loyal service in the late campaign. In this regard few were more deserving than Colonel Gorman of Indiana. Born in 1816, he was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty, and three years later became a member of the legislature. At the outbreak of the Mexican War he raised and commanded a battalion of riflemen and later a regiment of infantry. After that war he served two years in Congress, and deserved well of his party. His power upon the stump was enhanced by a graceful personality and a voice of great melody and strength. The affairs of the territory had already been organized and had fallen into an orderly routine, so that Governor Gorman’s administration of four years was not marked by notable executive acts. His messages abound in eloquent passages, generally commendatory of worthy enterprises and objects. The exigencies of politics and business presently put him and Mr. Sibley into the same bed, and affiliated Mr. Ramsey to some degree with Mr. Rice.
Legislative action was devoted mainly to provisions for the needs of a rapidly swelling population and expanding settlements. New counties were organized from year to year, and towns, cities, and villages were incorporated in astonishing numbers. College and university charters were distributed with liberal hand to aspiring municipalities. The disposition of the government appropriation for territorial roads occupied much time of the houses. The commissioners and surveyors employed in laying out the roads, and the contractors who undertook the construction, saw to it that no idle surpluses were left over. Plank-road charters were numerous, but none were ever built. Railroad incorporations occupy great space in the journals and statutes, perhaps because they had been excepted out of the general law of 1851 for the creation of corporations. Ferry privileges were much sought for.
The same conditions governed the activity of Mr. Rice, who took his seat as delegate in Congress in December, 1853. Industrious, persuasive, and soon influential, he promoted in many ways the interests of the territory and his constituents, and by so doing obtained a popularity hardly equaled in Minnesota history. He was diligent in laboring for the extension of the land surveys and the establishment of land offices. He secured the opening of post-offices in the new villages. His influence contributed to the extension of the preëmption system to unsurveyed lands, a change which virtually opened all lands not Indian to settlement. Mr. Rice’s own personal qualities were such as to give him wide acquaintance and influence, and these were extended in no small degree by those of the charming Virginian lady whom he had taken to wife. Standing for reëlection in the fall of 1855, he won by a handsome plurality over his Republican opponent, William R. Marshall, and another Democratic candidate, David Olmstead, supported by the friends of Mr. Sibley.