The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America

Changing Concepts of Land and Place

David Ress

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030314668
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030314675
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1824 and 1830, over one hundred thousand acres across Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska were set aside as a home for descendants of Native American women and white traders and trappers. The treaties that established these so-called Half Breed Tracts left undefined exactly who held claim to the land, and by the end of the 1850s, settlers and speculators had appropriated virtually every acre for themselves. But in an era of ravenous westward expansion, why did the process of dispossession require three decades of debate and legal maneuvering? As David Ress argues, the fate of the Half Breed Tracts complicates longstanding ideas about land tenure and community in early national America.

© The Author(s) 2019

D. RessThe Half Breed Tracts in Early National Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31467-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: A Caught-Between People and an Undefined Land

David Ress¹

(1)

Newport News, VA, USA

David Ress

Abstract

In peace treaties with several Native peoples of the upper Midwest negotiated in 1824 and 1830, the United States and Native chiefs agreed to set aside three reservations for the children of Native women and American, Canadian and European traders and trappers. But the question of how the land within the Half Breed Tracts of Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska was to be held was left open for three decades, reflecting a broader uncertainty about the nature of property rights in land, particularly land on the borderland between peoples and land on a frontier that seemed to many to be free for the taking. The delay in finally determining how the Half Breed Tracts were to be held—a determination that ended up dispossessing the people for whom the Tracts were intended—was the result of a conflict between notions that rights to land derived from labor on the land, from “discovery” of apparently available land, from legal decisions and from financial transactions.

Keywords

Half Breed TractsLand tenureBorderlandProperty rightsNative Americans

End Abstract

The bluffs above the Des Moines rapids on the Mississippi River could seem magical to travelers in the 1820s, a place where “Princes might dwell … and possess handsomer seats than any of them can boast of in the old world.” But the Iowa shore was uncrowned by any mansions, and would be for decades to come. Beyond what was then the farthest frontier of lawful settlement, those bluffs were in the 1820s still home to the Sac and Mesquakie (sometimes called Fox) people, and the rapids a favorite spot for a summer’s evening fishing, “their lights on the rapids in a dark night were darting about appearing and disappearing like so many fire flies, ” as the explorer and historian Caleb Atwater would recall. Daylight, though, revealed that “a few places are opened by half breeds,” he added. The most remarkable of all was a “double log house” surrounded by a palisade of logs and saplings. There, behind a gate made of a pair of elk antlers, an aging adventurer, fur trader and former US Office of Indian Trade sub-agent named Maurice Blondeau had settled. “[H]is family were owners of a considerable extent of this fine tract of land” Atwater reporting, mistaking the nature of the “fine fertile” farm with its long rows of corn parading up a hillside that Blondeau had made. Princely in manner, “nothing would do but I go with him to his farm,” yet another traveler recalled. Blondeau, son of a Canadian fur trader and a Mesquakie chief’s daughter, “took me all over the half breed reservation, as fine country as I ever saw, and finally remarked that he would give me all the land I wanted if I should happen to make a match with his niece, Louise,” the young fur trader Charles Larpenteur wrote decades later. He nearly accepted Blondeau’s lordly offer to settle on the Iowa Half Breed Tract, land set aside by treaty for descendants of Sac or Mesquakie women and white fathers. “Louise was one of the handsomest girls I ever saw,” he wrote later. “[I]t cost me many long sighs to leave her, and more afterward.” But he moved on up the river. It was probably just as well. Neither the princely Blondeau nor the beautiful Louise was ever able to secure their place on the bluffs.¹

In that moment when Larpenteur said his farewells and pushed his canoe away from that muddy Iowa riverbank there is a small, familiar tale: the temptation of home, its face the sweet vision of a pretty young woman, contesting with the lure of the distant horizon. It is a story about the place in the world that people seek, and sometimes find. Larpenteur opted for the seeking. He found a kind of place in the world: the wanderer’s, stopping here for a time, or there, welcomed for the trade goods he brought with him or the pelts he carried back to St. Louis or St. Paul. Yet there is another, less-told story to be found in that moment on the banks of the Mississippi. It can be seen by shifting our gaze from the dashing young man and beautiful young woman who are the usual central actors in the drama of the tempted drifter. Glance instead at the regretful uncle, the old fur trader Maurice Blondeau, as he watched Larpenteur paddling off. Blondeau’s story, too, is about a search for a place.

A place, that is, not a property. That is why this history starts with the bluffs along the Des Moines rapids of the Mississippi River, and the flickering torches of summer fishers, the dreams of princely palaces and regrets of a departing wanderer. Place is an idea—or, perhaps, better described as a notion, a feeling, a dream. It is a conception about land, but also about how individuals see themselves and the people around them fitting onto that land—the beliefs and the feelings that law and economics and the political structure of communities try to formalize. The idea of place, in its variations and evolution at a critical moment in the development of American society, is the subject here.

On those bluffs, the idea of place would be contested for more than three decades, unresolved by the 1824 treaty that Blondeau had helped negotiate. That treaty had, as a kind of afterthought, reserved some 119,000 acres of Iowa prairie and wooded bottomlands for descendants of Sac and Mesquakie women and men from the United States, British North America and Europe. The idea of place would be contested, too, after a treaty in 1830 with ten additional Native American nations created similar reservations on the shores of Lake Pepin in Minnesota and between the Great and Little Nemaha rivers in what is now the southeastern corner of Nebraska. On all these so-called Half Breed Tracts, however, the treaties left undefined who, exactly, would hold rights to land and how, exactly, they were to live there. It was unclear, moreover, not only because those rights holders were seen as neither obviously Native American nor indisputably members of any US community, but also because the idea of place was not yet a settled question for Americans on the frontier.

Formally speaking, both of the treaties said it was the chiefs of a dozen different Native polities who wanted to grant a part of their land as a place for “their half-breeds.” The United States went along, underscoring the particular possessive pronoun used here with language insisting that the Tracts were to be held “by the same title, and in the same manner, that other Indian titles are held.” Title to the land, that is, was with what Chief Justice John Marshall would shortly describe as a “domestic dependent nation,” although there was no such nation of Half Breed Tract rights holders. They were assumed to be a community simply by virtue of their parentage.²

Yet the Sac and the Mesquakie (Fox), who granted the Iowa Half Breed Tract, reckoned descent patrilineally, as did the Omaha, Otoe, Báxoǰe (Ioway) and Niúachi (Missouria) chiefs who granted the Nemaha Half Breed Tract. Normally, the place of “their half breeds” would have been derived from their non-Native fathers, in other words. The Dakota-speaking Mdewakanton, Sisíthuŋwaŋ (Sisseton); Waȟpékhute, Waȟpéthuŋwaŋ (Wahpeton), Iháŋkthuŋwaŋ (Yankton ) and Santee were matrilineal societies, so that “their half breeds” with rights to the Minnesota and Nemaha Half Breed Tracts would normally inherit a place in a community and property through their mothers. In any event, however, the place that all the chiefs seemed to envision for their peoples’ mixed-race relatives was to be separate from their nations’ own lands and own communities. The United States negotiators also intended for the treaty rights holders to live apart from their paternal relatives. For their American contemporaries, the unenumerated individuals with treaty rights to the three Tracts were simply alien: “half breeds,” or “mixed bloods”—or sometimes simply “Indian” or “Frenchman.” They were people caught between two societies. They were a part of neither.³

Under the terms of the treaty, their land, under its “Indian title,” was to be held by self-governing communities—but these were communities that did not in fact exist. Unlike the couple of thousand Métis of Canada’s Red River, Assiniboine and Saskatchewan river valleys, individuals with treaty rights to the Tracts had no shared institutions, no government, no agreed traditions of rights to access or use of land and no alliances with still-powerful Native peoples. Unlike the Métis, who had been in those Canadian river valleys for two or three generations, raising families, working the land and forming self-governing communities, treaty rights holders on the Half Breed Tracts were, for the most part, not even living near one another, or indeed on the reservations themselves. Unlike the several hundred members of the Creole communities described by historians Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Tanis Thorne at former old fur-trading posts in Wisconsin and Missouri, there were no institutions of US state authority to dictate a framework of land rights and community membership or neighbors whose shared heritage would support a social network that could last for generations. Unlike the few hundred individuals and families granted plots of land near their maternal relatives by US treaties with the Quapaw, Osage, Kaw (Kansa), Potawatomie, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Ponca and Pawnee nations, holders of rights to Half Breed Tract land were unnamed and scattered widely. Finally, unlike the Native nations of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, where many of the sons of Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw women and their British or American husbands assumed roles as chiefs and large landholders, Half Breed Tract treaty rights holders were not able to use the institutions of their mothers’ peoples to assume the power to dictate the use and occupation of that land.⁴

Histories of frontier settlement meanwhile routinely—even casually—conflate land hunger with a hunger to own land, and see in the urge to own the genius of democratic government. “Americans came to believe that all men should own land, and that widespread ownership of land was characteristic of a virtuous society,” historian William B. Scott wrote in his classic study of American concepts of property, while Michal Rozbicki notes that by the late 1770s, “representations of America as a country ‘abounding with free men … where estates are held in fee simple,’ had become customary.” In the United States “the seemingly limitless land” led people to see “opportunity for each individual to enjoy the property privileges reserved for the elite in England and Europe,” Richard Andrews argues in his environmental history, a point John Weaver reiterates and extends to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. The view that protection of property rights was a central aim of American self-government, dating back to the earliest days of settlement in the seventeenth century, has been a theme in American historiography since at least George Bancroft completed his magis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: A Caught-Between People and an Undefined Land
• 2. Blondeau ’s Dilemma
• 3. Separation or Separate Property: The Unsettling Prospect of Ownership
• 4. Washington’s Dilemma
• 5. The Courthouse Coup in Iowa
• 6. Scrip and the Taking of the Minnesota Half Breed Tract
• 7. Taking the Nebraska Half Breed Tract
• 8. Charley’s Land
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter