In early 1837, the Commissioner dispatched a trusted investigator, Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, to evaluate the situation. He reported that water-power sites and locations for dams and impoundments along the streams in the pinery region, vital for timbering, were few in number. Hence, unregulated, the American Fur Company’s successors could quickly obtain exclusive control of timber resources, which would block broader development of the region. From Fort Snelling, Agent Taliaferro reinforced Hitchcock’s reports, emphasizing—so he claimed—the opposition of these entrepreneurs to government interests and the growing antagonism of the Chippewa to them. Later, Wisconsin’s territorial governor, Henry Dodge, expressed additional reasons for defining a serious threat in the efforts of this cabal: they were, he charged, loyal to British interests.22

Thus, in addition to the concern with maintaining the government’s ascendancy in managing Indians and the need to promote extraction of pine timber vital for regional development, two Jacksonian specters hovered over the preliminaries to the Chippewa’s first land cession: the threats of private monopoly and of increased British incursions into the economy of the Northwest frontier. Underneath, however, the real threat was one of old-resident, locally influential   individuals to the established Democratic patronage system, interests that threatened the flow of political benefits to the faithful. In May, 1837, Governor Dodge received instructions for this first Lake Superior Chippewa land sale. Therein the Commissioner of Indian Affairs narrowly emphasized to him the importance of acquiring the pine lands but forbade recognition of any existing private leases for lumbering, which in the end only provoked a land-rush for key sites even before the treaty was ratified 23
   Although a comprehensive national removal policy was then being implemented, no hint of such a provision was contained in these instructions or expressed during actual negotiations. On the contrary, Governor Dodge was directed to press for use of the proceeds for long-term local Chippewa social and economic development on their remaining lands in Wisconsin and Minnesota and to determine whether the western Chippewa bands would allow the United States to resettle the Ottawa and Chippewa of Michigan among them. From the perspective of Washington and the officials of Wisconsin Territory, there was yet no need to bring about the dislocation and westward “removal” of these Chippewa bands. Instead, they were expected eventually to resettle voluntarily among their kin to the north and west.2

Practical arrangements for this parley created immediate and long-range problems. Since the Lake Superior Chippewa had been in an administrative never-never land (their villages were located between and remote from the Indian agencies at Sault Ste Marie and Fort Snelling), they had never been effectively served by any Indian agent. The latter place was convenient to Governor Dodge’s offices in Mineral Point, close to the Mississippi River traffic-way in extreme southwestern Wisconsin. But his selection of Fort Snelling as the treaty grounds placed arrangements for the meeting in the energetic hands of Agent Taliaferro. Taliaferro was rarely slack in promoting the interests of Indians within his jurisdiction— in this instance the Chippewa bands of the Upper Mississippi—nor reluctant to thwart the influence of his rival at the Mackinac Island-Sault Ste Marie Agency, Henry R. Schoolcraft. Thus from the start, the Mississippi bands, only a small fraction of whose lands were involved in this negotiation, were administratively much favored. The second cluster of Chippewa involved were from bands on the Lake Superior shoreline, and none of their lands were ceded that year. Lastly came the interior Wisconsin Chippewa of the Mississippi Rivers eastern watershed, whose lands were on the block that summer. These interior bands did not receive an official announcement of the treaty, and few of their leaders arrived at Fort Snelling in time to participate in or benefit immediately from the arrangements. This happened because neither of the two newly appointed sub-agents dispatched to carry word of the meetings—Miles M.Vineyard from Crow Wing above Fort Snelling and Daniel P. Bushnell from La Pointe—visited the interior Wisconsin bands. Indeed, a year later Bushnell still hardly knew the locations of the bands he served or the boundaries of his sub-agency.26

Although in earlier treaties the Chippewa had been identified as a “tribe,” the treaty sought at the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Peter’s rivers in July 1837, was negotiated with a new, American-conceived political-administrative fiction, the “Chippewa Nation.” The use of “nation” did not denote any sense of political sovereignty. Instead it was used as a means of dealing with the several Chippewa bands collectively. This novel appellation allowed American authorities to negotiate with some of their delegates as if they represented all and to treat the whole of the lands they occupied as a “national” estate, a concept alien to traditional Chippewa thinking. But while the leaders from the bands on the Lake Superior shore demurred, on the principle that the tract being ceded were not theirs to sell, the powerful chiefs from the Mississippi bands made no attempt to disabuse American negotiators of this misconception. Indeed, since they had little to lose and much to gain, they dominated the proceedings, intimidating their kin from east of the Mississippi. The few leaders from interior Wisconsin, whose lands were being disposed of, arrived late and scarcely raised their voices.27 

On the American side of the conference table, although instructed to obtain an outright sale of  the whole region, Governor Dodge repeatedly said he wanted only control of the pine forests. Recognizing an opening when they saw it, the Chippewa instructed their official speakers, Megegabow (The Trap) and the elder Bugonageshig (the elder Hole in the Day) in their reply.28 

On July 27, Magegabow, in flowery words embellished by symbolic gestures, tried to communicate the Mississippi bands’ chiefs’ interim negotiating position. The Chippewa, he proclaimed, would sell the particular lands wanted by Americans, but they wished “to hold on to a tree where we get our living, & to reserve the streams where we go to drink the water that gives us life.” The Secretary recording these debates, Verplanck Van Antwerp, was nonplused, noting in the margin of the minutes, “This of course is nonsense. . I presume it to mean that the Indians wish to reserve the privilege of hunting, fishing, etc. on the lands.” Clearly, this was not the American intention. Just as clearly, the Chippewa leaders understood their adversaries’ aims of acquiring clear ownership of the whole tract. Meanwhile, Magegabow continued, laying an oak bough on the table before Governor Dodge and saying, this is “the tree we wish to reserve. . It is a different kind of tree from the one you wish to get from us.”29
   Although these Mississippi bands’ spokesmen had no direct interest in the lands being sold, they were declaring their willingness to sell pinelands (useless to them) and their desire to reserve from the sale the deciduous forests and the waterways, which were of particular value to the interior Chippewa as the game-poor coniferous forests were not. Certainly the Mississippi bands’ leaders understood the American aim to purchase the use and occupancy rights to the whole region outright, for the governor had repeatedly explained this both before and after Magegabow’s speech. What they were doing was hedging, inserting a qualification into the official record, one they could later use to dodge undesirable ramifications of the agreement or to reopen negotiations.3The participating Chippewa finally approved an outright sale of the whole tract. Notably, no mention of removal from the lands was inserted into the agreement; neither had there been any discussion of this matter. Instead, the treaty awarded the Chippewa the temporary privilege of residing on and taking their subsistence from the habitat ceded, “during the pleasure of the President.” With these words the Senate delegated to the executive branch the necessary authority to determine when, in the future, Chippewa rights to occupy and to exploit the pine lands should end. Certainly, the Chippewa, at the time, construed these expressions to mean a very long time. Since they could see few Americans in their lands and since it was to be years before their basic adaptations were much disturbed by aliens there, they had no reason to think otherwise. Indeed, American officials at the time expressed no definite ideas about when this privilege would be withdrawn. However, an eyewitness to the negotiations recorded a foreboding judgment about the “pleasure of the President” phrasing, not about the timing, but about the way this privilege would ultimately be withdrawn. Writing to his superior in Boston, missionary W. T. Boutwell predicted

“trouble with the Chipys. before five years should they attempt to remove them . . . the Inds. have no idea of leaving their country while they live—they know nothing of the duration of a man's pleasure.”31

An experienced observer of Chippewa ways, Boutwell was commenting on several social facts. The scattered, politically decentralized Chippewa, especially those in Wisconsin, would not feel themselves bound to contracts made by distant chiefs not their own, and they would likely resist a later order to abandon the ceded lands issued by any remote authority figure such as the President. But so far as American authorities were concerned, a firm agreement had been reached: the lands wanted had been acquired by outright purchase, while continued Chippewa use of the area was impermanent. So, too, were realized certain of the “expectations” expressed by Flat Mouth the previous year. Those Chippewa at the treaty grounds received a modest amount of goods, and the bands later got the benefits of a substantial twenty-year term annuity. For a time the annual payments—whether goods or money—were shared among some of the constituent bands of the fictive “Chippewa nation,” especially those from the Upper Mississippi and from interior Wisconsin. Although few of the latter had participated in the negotiations, after protesting the next year, they finally accepted the treaty’s terms when assured they would share in these annual payments. The Lake Superior shoreline bands, however, by their own choice were excluded from the annual compensation. Nonetheless, a few of the latter were soon issuing complaints like those of  Flat Mouth in 1836, expressing envy of those bands who were receiving payments from the United States and indicating a disposition to sell additional lands in exchange for annuities. Some American authorities, too, were concerned with this disparity, particularly because the lakeshore Chippewa still regularly visited British posts to receive “presents,” stipends supposedly “5 times” greater than the annual per capita payments from the 1837 treaty.33   

Meanwhile, in the interior, the lumber rush was on. Hardly had the treaty been signed when the old resident entrepreneurs, whose maneuvers had helped precipitate the cession in the first place, flooded into the pine lands, there preempting prime mill sites and timber tracts well before the treaty's ratification, land surveys, or public sales. The resentments of Lake Superior-shore Chippewa were exacerbated by a decision reached by American authorities. Although the large, long established traders lobbied for Fort Snelling or—ominously—Sandy Lake, as the point of distribution for annuity goods, and while the Chippewa recipients themselves preferred several locations convenient to their Villages, the Office of Indian Affairs fixed on La Pointe as the one place where the Chippewa had to gather yearly to take delivery of their treaty dividends. Therefore, for several years the lakeshore bands had to stand by and watch as those from the west and south assembled amidst them to receive payments. Certainly, significant parts of the goods and money delivered initially to the visiting Chippewa delegations quickly flowed, through long-established kin ties and reciprocal exchange networks, into the hands of the Lake Superior hosts. But this could not have satisfied the chiefs of the lakeshore villages, who witnessed their counterparts, especially the notably imperious and ostentatious leaders of the Mississippi bands, receive recognition and rewards denied to them. Thus more fuel was added to a growing discord, which soon pitted all Wisconsin Chippewa against those from the Upper Mississippi.34

However, at the time, no one recognized the truly hazardous economic transformation then emerging. For many decades, these Chippewa, as specialized winter trappers, had been involved in flexible, personalized, predictable exchange relationships with individual traders. Now they were collectively dependent on a complex, ill-organized, impersonal federal appropriation-purchase-transportation-accounting-delivery system, a cumbersome arrangement that rarely brought payments due to a place on a date compatible with their own seasonal subsistence work. Over the next decade the Chippewa learned that this system seldom worked satisfactorily: long delays and interference in late fall wild-rice gathering and winter hunting, not to mention the costs of long distance travel to the payment grounds, were the rule.

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