Treaty of Old Crossing
[1]: 68–72 The pressure to remove "Indians" from the American portion of the Red River Valley originated with U.S. Army Major Samuel Woods expedition in 1849 to locate a site for a military post.
He was instructed to proceed north to Pembina, "to hold conferences with the Indians and learn whether their lands in the Red River Valley might be purchased and opened for white settlement.
In 1862 railroad interests along with promoters of land development asked the U.S. Government to renew efforts to negotiate a "treaty" with the Ojibwe for the cession of the Red River Valley.
The Chippewa leaders encamped at the Old Crossing in mid-August, awaiting the U.S. treaty commission that included President Lincoln's private secretary, John George Nicolay.
When hostilities of the Sioux Uprising spread into the Red River Valley, the treaty commission was forced to seek refuge at Fort Abercrombie.
[citation needed] The main negotiator for the United States in the Treaties of Old Crossing was Alexander Ramsey, ex-Governor and made Indian Commissioner in late spring of 1863.
[8]: 170–171 On September 21, 1863, Ramsey arrived escorted by troops of the 8th Minn. Additionally accompanied by a battery of the 3rd Minn. light Artillery and 90 assorted wagons, 340 mules, 180 horses, and 55 oxen.
He simply wishes that his people should enjoy the privilege of traveling through their country on steamboats and wagons unmolestedEven after the initial proposal for a mere right of way was rejected, he was representing that if they sold their land, the Ojibwe could still occupy it and hunt on it for a long time.
Governor Ramsey bragged that it was the lowest price per acre ever paid for Indian land cessions in the history of the United States.
It also added a proviso to Article 8, prohibiting any assignment of the half-breed scrip until after the patent had been issued to the original claimant, after 5 years of proving up the claim.
The balance of the funds were specifically earmarked for the satisfaction of specific claims for "depredations committed by said Indians" on Euro-American traders' goods at the Red Lake River and for "exactions forcibly levied by [said Indians]" on the steamship operations on the Red River, and the remainder was to be allocated pro rata in satisfaction of other claims.
Governor Ramsey virtually admitted the fraud he had perpetrated in his letter transmitting the final treaty to Congress for ratification, saying:[19] I stated to them very plainly, that if the offers were not agreeable to them they should make another proposition.
By the text of the treaty, the signatory Ojibwe bands did "hereby cede, sell, and convey to the United States all their right, title, and interest in and to all the lands now owned and claimed by them ... within the following described boundaries:".
Most of the indemnity fund wound up in the hands of Norman Kittson, who had pioneered steamship operations on the Red River as a means of handling a burgeoning trade with the Hudson's Bay Company.
The leading historian of North Dakota, Elwyn B. Robinson, described the treaty as satisfying the "sullen Chippewa" who had "wanted to sell their land to the United States" and who had "plundered" fur traders' property and "threatened to stop the steamboat" if their long-frustrated desires were thwarted.
[8]: 284–285 A standard Minnesota history work states:[8]: 284 Though the treaties ceding the Red River Valley followed shortly after the Sioux War, they were not in any direct sense a consequence of the outbreak.
In fact, commissioners had been sent out from Washington in 1862 to negotiate a treaty, but the plan had been interrupted by the Indian war.Norman Kittson, the long-time supplier of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the steamship operator who probably benefited most directly from the treaty, had been a partner of "Jolly Joe" Rolette in the abortive effort to develop the townsite of Douglas, the "Magnificent City of the West", on Ojibwe Land at the Old Crossing.
Henry Sibley, the marauding militia leader that carried a punitive expedition against the Sioux in the eastern part of Dakota Territory and throughout the Red River Valley, was a former partner in the fur trade with "Jolly Joe's father, "Old Joe" Rolette, and later recruited Norman Kittson himself as his partner in the fur trade and the supply of Hudson's Bay Company and Fort Garry.
It was Kittson who invited the Woods-Pope reconnaissance of the Red River Valley in 1849 and the initial sounding out of the Ojibwe about their willingness to part with their land for United States settlement purposes, who met the expedition and provided critical information about the lay of the land and its inhabitants, and whose clerk, the younger Rolette, provided Woods and Pope lodgings and entertainment while they engaged the Red Lake and Pembina bands in discussions in 1849.
Soon after, Norman Kittson and James J. Hill started their steamboat operations on the river, to supplement their already substantial ox cart trade.
[7]: 456 It was Kittson, as well, who got caught at Georgetown with a load of trade goods when the Sioux Uprising intervened, and who encountered the hungry and disgruntled Ojibwe encamped at Grand Forks, waiting for the United States commissioners who never arrived with the promised trade goods and provisions during the planned treaty negotiations, in 1862; the Ojibwe encamped at Grand Forks confiscated some of his cargo for food[6]: 23 and thereby committed the "depredations by said Indians" for which Kittson later collected nearly $100,000 in indemnity payments under the treaty negotiated the next year.
[23]: 15 Bottineau had worked for Sibley and Kittson for years, had accompanied Sioux and Ojibwe tribal delegates to Washington, D.C. as a "trusted interpreter" in 1849–50, immediately after the Woods-Pope foray to Pembina, had guided the first Ramsey expedition to Pembina in 1851 that resulted in the initial unratified treaty ceding Ojibwe claims to the Red River Valley, and had guided any number of government and military surveys, railroad surveys, sportsmen, journalists, settlers and townsite promoters around the Red River Valley and other points south, east and west, both before and after the Ojibwe and Dakota ceded their territory for white settlement.
[24] Bottineau himself had a hand in the founding of several townsites in Minnesota in the late 1850s, including the town of La Fayette, on the east side of the Red River of the North, in still unceded Ojibway territory, in 1857.
[1]: 78–84, 121–22 Bottineau went on to found the town of Red Lake Falls and recruited French-Canadian immigrants to settle the recently ceded Ojibwe lands in nearby Louisville Township, where he also founded the townsite of Huot, the site of the Old Crossing Treaty negotiations as well as the former location of the nonexistent town of Douglas as first county seat of Polk County.
