I'm sitting in my old neighborhood in the City of Lakes, enjoying a fine summer evening, listening to groovy music, and watching the blue moon rise.
The scent of barbecued ribs is wafting up the street from Rudolphs, and I can hear people having a high old time down there.
Tomorrow I will travel to my hometown to play frisbee golf on a farm where we throw our frisbees at oil paintings and fixed pastels of nudes instead of wire baskets. Hawks will fly over our heads and deer will run across our course. A valley will bestow its beauty before us, and I will imagine the mixed children of white traders and M'dewakanton Dakotah living there in harmony before being forced out and rubbed out in the mid-1800s.
This farmland land was originally the heart of what was known as the Half-Breed Tract, and set aside by the US government for the offspring of white traders and their Indian wives. There's little about this in the history books, as it seems it's not desirable for The Rest of Us to know that whites and Indians once lived in harmony in the 1700s in this area.
How the land passed from the M'dewakanton and Santee people into mixed blood hands and ultimately into the hands of men like my great-great grandfather is an interesting one. Threats were made, and
At a meeting of those interested in the cause of the settlers, which was held at the Kelly House in Red Wing, March 17, 1856, a vigilance committee of 21 members was chosen to prevent any more scrip being laid upon the land already occupied. This committee was empowered to demand that in every case where scrip had been laid on the land of actual settlers, said scrip should immediately be raised. The members of the committee were men of dauntless courage and muscular power, and devoted their whole time and energy to the work until it was accomplished. Two of them stood as sentinels at the land office armed with loaded revolvers, constantly watching every transaction therein, being relieved by another two at stated times. In the meanwhile the majority of the committee were acting as detectives, arresting and bringing to trial those who had offended, the trial not being before a court of justice, but before the committee. There was at that time no courthouse and no jail, and the lawyers knew that the scrip holders were acting within their legal rights. The holders, however, were threatened and intimidated by the committee and through fear compelled to raise the scrip, though there is no record of any personal injury being inflicted on anyone. That such would have been inflicted in case of continued resistance there is little doubt, as one man was led to a hole cut through the ice in the river, and given his choice either to raise his entry of scrip or be put through the hole, and though he was a man of strength and courage, he found it prudent to submit. There were other cases of the same kind.From The History of Wabasha County, Minnesota, chapter 3, 1920.
Picture: Chief Wabasha II, from 1823.
