On the other hand, there were unanticipated benefits from the treaty. As the clear-cutting of pine forests progressed, the size of the ecotone—the pine forest-prairie “edge” where white-tailed deer flourished—was vastly increased. Since deer were the most desirable and the prime source of food for the interior Chippewa, as the size of the herds increased the subsistence value to them of the lands they had ceded was also enhanced. This ramification was precisely contrary to standing American preconceptions: that the advance of “civilization” would cause a decline of available game and the voluntary migration of the “primitive Indian hunter.”35

Nonetheless, although the issue had not been raised during the 1837 negotiations or by the Senate in ratifying this accord, Indian removal was in the air, for the resettlement of Indians from other parts of the Old Northwest was then being pressed vigorously. In response to rumors of such dislocations and reactions from the Chippewa, local Indian agents regularly advised their supervisors that the Lake Superior Chippewa would resist this threat with all means available to them. There was, simultaneously, little or no indication from neighboring citizens that moving the Chippewa was a desirable tactic. But these Chippewa had to cope with the real danger of treaty stipulated resettlement in the west during September, 1842. That month the same three clusters of bands that had negotiated the 1837 agreement gathered at La Pointe to debate a second cession, this one involving all remaining Chippewa territory in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Again the Americans sought, not agricultural lands, but control of a valuable natural resource, the copper-ore rich tracts along the Lake Superior shore line.

The treaty dealings at La Pointe were in striking contrast to the 1837 council. At the earlier sessions, negotiations were, by the standards of the day, conducted in an open and aboveboard fashion, despite some manifest miscommunication and confusion. In 1842, the meetings provoked angry discord between opposed parties and a lasting controversy. Before the final 1842 treaty document was signed, the chief American negotiator, Robert Stuart, had to engage in a variety of tricky tactical moves and coercive threats to force through an agreement. Moreover, to secure the consent of the parties most imperiled—Wisconsin’s interior and the Wisconsin-Michigan Lake Superior shoreline bands—he had to issue firm verbal commitments, explicit stipulations not written into the formal agreement. Stuart (long a senior agent of the American Fur Company, recently appointed to succeed Henry R. Schoolcraft as head of the Mackinac Superintendency) faced an unusually complex and contentious situation. In addition to his duty to the United States, he had firmly in mind the fiscal needs of his former employer, John Jacob Astor. Moreover, he confronted an unruly assembly of diverse and generally opposed interests: old trading firms and newly established ones, several denominations of missionaries, mining entrepreneurs, the culturally marginal “half-breed” community, commercial fishermen, and—by no means the least divided or quarrelsome—the Chippewa themselves.3The latter were now separating decisively into two divisions, those from the Upper Mississippi, and those who occupied the lands ceded in 1837 and the tracts to be sold at this meeting. Moreover, because control of the last of the Chippewa’s Wisconsin lands was at issue, all involved were possessed of more than the usual windfall mania, which often stimulated dramatic confrontations at Indian treaty proceedings during this era. Thus in October the parties gathered in a variously expectant, threatened, or angry mood. Most of them, “who otherwise before-time was but poor and needy, by these windfalls and unexpected cheats” eagerly anticipated obtaining some benefit, security if not wealth.4

They milled about for days and nights eager to shake free of the great treaty tree—each in his own direction—some of its perennial fruits. The instructions Stuart received from Commissioner Thomas H. Crawford were of a sort to vex or inflame most of these interest groups. He could allow no payment of  traders’ claims on the treaty grounds, a provision subsequently softened. Neither personal reservations for half-breeds or “friends” of the Indians, nor band reservations for the Lake Superior Chippewa were allowed. Most important for the future of these Indians was the unyielding two-stage requirement for their dislocation and resettlement. Those Chippewa immediately affected offered no opposition to the first of these, the plan for their immediate abandonment of those particular tracts containing copper ore. Neither did they oppose the cession of nearly all their remaining lands. They demanded, however, several small band or community reservations, both within the area ceded in 1837 and the lake shore region now on the table for disposition. Stuart’s instructions about the removal provision, however, were firm. The Chippewa would have now to agree one day to abandon the land sold and to resettle in the remaining “national” lands west of Lake Superior, that is, in the territory of the rivals, the Mississippi bands. But the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had stressed, and Stuart in council repeatedly emphasized, that this second step migration would not be required for a “considerable time,” not until “policy” required the President to call for their relocation.41

On that issue—the timing of their resettlement—the fate of the negotiations hung. While Stuart readily disposed of the traders’ demands and those of the half-breeds, the removal issue so threatened the Wisconsin bands that they resisted obstinately. It was then that Stuart resorted to a heavy-handed deception, claiming that the Chippewa had already ceded the mineral tracts in 1826, an allegation that the Chippewa delegates (and their American allies) denied. Ultimately, to obtain substantial support for the treaty from those nominally in control of the lands, he introduced a decision-making novelty—majority rule. The lakeshore and interior bands, relying on the traditional requirement of a consensus, were thereby outmaneuvered. Unaffected by the cession or the removal provisions, and in line to reap yet more benefits at no cost to themselves, the eager chiefs of the Mississippi bands quickly gave Stuart their “votes.” They had no more intention of welcoming the Wisconsin Chippewa into their lands than the latter had of moving there. For entirely different reasons, so, too, did the small Catholic and Methodist mission communities on the Keweenaw Peninsula cast their “votes” for Stuart’s proposals. This minority of christianized Chippewa believed that they could avoid removal by becoming landowning, tax-paying, farming citizens of the State of Michigan.42

Even so the Wisconsin bands balked and protested. Stuart then inserted into the oral record a critical clarification and stipulation. Yes, he and the Chippewa soon agreed, they would immediately have to give up occupancy and use of the copper ore tracts proper. Additionally, some day in the future the President would likely require the Chippewa to abandon all the lands being ceded and to settle elsewhere. The question pressed by the Chippewa chiefs was—when? In the distant future, replied Stuart. Be more specific, demanded the suspicious chiefs. Not during your lifetimes, nor those of your children, not for fifty to one hundred years, were Stuart’s phrasings as recorded by different observers. Indeed, Stuart himself  later repeatedly defended the rights of these Chippewa under such mutual understandings when others violated the explicit assurances this tough-minded Scot had publicly given.4

Nonetheless, although most of the Wisconsin chiefs then capitulated, several remained unbelievers and refused to place their marks on the treaty document. In this manner was created the basis for a later, prolonged, unresolved dispute over the meaning of the 1842 agreement, a controversy over the issue of timing of Chippewa removal, the first necessary ingredient for the trouble that erupted eight years later. This controversy raged over what the Chippewa and their supporters (including Stuart) saw as premature demands for these Indians to move. No further condition, such as the Chippewa’s “continued good behavior,” had been discussed during the debates over terms, nor was any such condition mentioned in the years immediately following. However, for more than a year before the 1842 treaty, a few key actors in Wisconsin Territory had regularly misinformed authorities in Washington to the effect that the Chippewa were eager both to cede their lands and to resettle west of Lake Superior. Together with his allies, Governor James D. Doty—who had strong personal and political interests in developing the new Northern Indian Territory in Minnesota and the Dakotas—was first among these promoters.45  Superintendent Stuart, following his first visits to his new charges, particularly after his exertions in extracting a land cession agreement from them, knew better. When the few advocating Chippewa removal continued their efforts, Stuart stood in opposition, arguing he had personally and officially promised them no removal for many years. Of greater practical importance, he pointed out, there were no obvious incentives for the Chippewa to make this move, for they had ample supplies of fish, game, and wild rice in their present locations and were experiencing few problems with the influx of Americans in the region.4

In addition, the Wisconsin bands were by no means eager to settle among those on the Mississippi, who twice had been deployed against them to their disadvantage, especially because they knew that the remaining part of the “national” estate was an impoverished area. Chippewa resistance to removal was reinforced because, as they understood the 1842 treaty, they could not be obligated to give up use and occupancy of the ceded lands for many years, and this construction was championed by numerous Americans directly familiar with its negotiation. Similarly, the tactics used against them in the 1837 and 1842 negotiations had led to increased solidarity between Wisconsin’s interior and lakeshore bands. Facing a common threat in their politically altered environment, they began responding with better coordinated opposition. Prompt organization of their dissent was imperative, for within a year following the treaty, new pressures developed for their immediate dislocation. Despite the early opposition of Superintendent Stuart, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Crawford, Governor Dodge, and others, who variously argued that immediate removal was against the spirit of the treaty expressed in explicit verbal stipulations or that it would not benefit the Chippewa, this pestering continued and increased in strength. Wisconsin Chippewa opposition came into clear and successful focus in 1847, when the United States made an abortive effort to secure the cession of the mineral-rich north shore of Lake Superior.

Knowing how much Americans valued control of that region, the Wisconsin Chippewa used as a bargaining token their rights to this—for their economic purposes—barren landscape. Without a treaty-guaranteed right to remain in Wisconsin, the Chippewa would have nothing to do with negotiations for the cession of the north shore, which they managed to block until 1854, when their demands for reservations were finally met.48

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