There he began arranging his own future as well, at that profitable intersection between private enterprise and public business. He established a mutually promising relationship with the agents of Chouteau and Company, the St. Louis firm that dominated trade in that area, and with potential contractors, suppliers, and transportation firms in St. Paul. By the end of July, 1850, he enjoyed a freedom of action greater than most Indian agents, for three key figures at the top of the Whig political hierarchy and national administration were gone, with the death of President Taylor and the resignations of Secretary Ewing and Commissioner Brown. Meanwhile, Congress was violently debating the Great Compromise, not mundane domestic matters such as the Indian Appropriation Bill. Thus an unanticipated ingredient was added to Watrous’s covert plan—whatever he did or abstained from doing, the vital Chippewa annuity money would certainly be dangerously late in arriving. At the same time, the Chippewa were celebrating what seemed to them a success. Watrous had led them to believe that they had only to come to Sandy Lake—285 to 485 difficult canoe and portage miles to the west—to receive their annuities. Some Chippewa determined to do this, while all understood that they could for many years remain in Wisconsin even if it meant giving up the treaty specified annuities and local services of blacksmiths and farmers.64

These Indians and local citizens had no inkling that, earlier in the year, Commissioner Brown had sent Governor Ramsey a different set of orders and a plan, which Watrous, if not himself its principal architect, was certainly aware of before he left Washington in late April. This plan was never made public, allowing Ramsey and Watrous later to deny that a removal had ever been intended during the winter of 1850—1851. The scheme was straight-forward. Annuity goods and money were to be paid only to those Chippewa who traveled to Sandy Lake accompanied by their families. These payments were not to be made in late summer or fall, because then the Chippewa would simply return to “their old haunts.” Instead, the payments were to be made only after winter had set in, preventing travel by canoe. Someone, most likely Watrous, had advised the Commissioner of the Chippewa’s great aversion to overland winter travel. Lured by their annuities, they were to be trapped near Sandy Lake by winter's freeze.

In early October, the Lake Superior Chippewa were informed that both their cash and goods annuities would be waiting for them at Sandy Lake on the 25th of that month, a date already dangerously late in the season, which guaranteed at minimum further disruption of their own seasonal subsistence work. Watrous had by then obtained the goods specified in the 1837 and 1842 treaties and had them, together with a grossly inadequate supply of rations, delivered to Sandy Lake at extraordinarily high prices. Since the new sub-agency’s farms were not yet in operation, there were no public food supplies stored at that remote location. Thus, once the Chippewa received their money annuities, they were heavily dependent for basics on purchases from the local traders, since the marshy Sandy Lake region, as well as the route going and coming, were notoriously deficient in game. This deficiency was exacerbated when the upper Mississippi flooded that season, inundating the crude structures where the supplies of both the government and the private traders were stored, spoiling the inadequate amounts of flour and salt pork available, and destroying the local wild rice crop. To compound these sources of nutritional stress, the Lake Superior shoreline Chippewa had a poor fishing season earlier that year and had already experienced grave food shortages.66

Constructed in this manner by several key actors with personal and political goals overriding any concern they may have had for their charges, with an assist from uncontrollable natural and institutional events, a tragedy lay in waiting for those Chippewa electing to hazard the long trip to Sandy Lake. Not all the Lake Superior Chippewa accepted the high risks they could see in this dangerous edge-of-winter journey. The bands at L’Anse, Ontonagon, Pelican Lake, and La Vieux Desert refused entirely. Those from the headwaters of the Wisconsin River sent but two men, and the villages on the Chippewa River drainage somewhat more. More came from the La Pointe area villages, but in all these instances the Chippewa took precautions. Ignoring orders to bring their families, they dispatched mainly adult males. Apparently, only from those villages closest to Sandy Lake, on Lake Superior's north shore and on the upper Mississippi, did some family groups make the journey. Moreover, intending to pack the annuity goods for their communities home by canoe and on their backs, these delegations traveled light, without the rolls of  birchbark and woven mats needed to sheath temporary wigwams, many even without their firearms. These decisions further contributed to the physiological stress they experienced over the next three winter months.67 

Those Chippewa bands who sent delegations to collect their annuities coordinated their travel plans. Coming by different routes, they assembled at Fond du Lac before pressing up the difficult portages along the St. Louis River, and then via the Savanna portage to the marsh and bogs surrounding Sandy Lake. Exactly how many made the trip is uncertain. It was likely fewer than 3,000, the figure Watrous later used in boasting of how many he had “removed” that winter. Earlier, he claimed 4,000 had assembled by November 10, but this number included some 1,500 from the Mississippi and Pillager bands, present to collect their annuities, not to be resettled. Watrous never provided his superiors with careful counts or lists of those who arrived, for once confronted with the disaster his actions had caused and the great hostility of the assembled Chippewa, he distributed the remaining putrefying rations and the other goods from the flooded warehouses to those present, disregarding his orders to deliver only to family groups.6

Those Lake Superior Chippewa hazarding this journey began arriving at Sandy Lake in mid-October. They discovered Watrous gone and no one present authorized to parcel out the goods waiting for them; he was on his way to St. Louis supposedly to collect the more valuable annuity money. Soon the suffering began— from illness, hunger, and exposure. The sojourners lacked shelter, and most of the scanty supply of spoiled government rations were quickly consumed, leading to an epidemic of dysentery so incapacitating and deadly that American witnesses were certain it was cholera. This was soon accompanied by an epidemic of measles, which further contributed to high rates of illness and fatalities.

The Chippewa were concentrated in an unsanitary, water logged area, with few natural food supplies available. While they lacked shelter and medical services, were unable to collect their goods, waited day-to-day for the arrival of Watrous to bring their critically needed money payments and to open the warehouses, the Chippewa’s health and energy were increasingly sapped by hunger, infectious diseases, and the winter now on them. If some of these components had been absent, they might have scattered, reducing the rate of reinfection. As it was, American witnesses reported that on many days there were eight or nine deaths, so many that the few who were well could not inter the corpses properly. Watrous saw only the last days of this calamity, for he was absent from his post until November 24, a month later than the promised payment date that had lured the Chippewa west. After sending messages for the Chippewa to assemble, on October 6 he left for St. Louis and arrived there on the 21st, four days before the scheduled payment, then at least two weeks hard travel to the north. In St. Louis he soon learned that no funds had arrived and none were expected that year, information he could easily have anticipated while yet in St. Paul, for the national political crisis had so stalled Congress that for months little attention was given ordinary domestic matters. The Appropriation Bill providing funds for the Chippewa’s annuities did not pass until November 12, much too late in the year for the required physical delivery of the specie to such a remote location. Watrous on October 26 finally took passage on a steamer for his return trip, but the vessel was delayed, and he did not arrive at St. Paul until November 13. There he tarried two more days, attending to his own business, mainly pleading to obtain an upgrading of his Sub-Agency and a promotion for himself. He did not leave St. Paul until the 15th, and then the onset of winter forced him to abandon his canoe and travel on foot overland, an ill augury for the sick, starving Chippewa at Sandy Lake, who had been waiting six weeks for their goods and money.7

The major unanticipated institutional ingredient adding to the scale of the disaster organized by Brown, Ramsey, and Watrous was the failure of Congress to appropriate funds for the Indian Department in a timely fashion. Without hard cash to purchase necessaries for the winter, the Chippewa—who in addition to the epidemic illness, great loss of life, and their general debilitation had lost an entire season’s subsistence production—were in even more desperate condition. However, on arriving at Sandy Lake on the 24th and seeing the consequences of his scheme, Watrous set to work cutting his administrative losses. The idea of trying to keep these sick, starving Chippewa near the Mississippi was swiftly dropped. He then did what little he could to relieve their “pinching wants.” After much wrangling over who would be responsible for the unauthorized expenditure, he persuaded the traders to deliver a small quantity of ammunition at a highly inflated cost to the Chippewa for subsistence hunting on their way home. Similarly, he drew up arrangements for the traders to deliver to the Chippewa from their stores $8,368.40 in provisions, an advance against their yet unpaid cash annuity, at what he claimed were “the most reason able terms possible.” The terms were in fact extraordinary, three to six times those of prices at St. Paul and other nearby depots. By Governor Ramsey’s own estimates, this amount was barely three days supply of food, entirely insufficient for the Chippewa’s arduous return trip.71

Finally, on December 3, with winter fully on them, when their scanty rations and goods were at last in their hands, the encampments broke up. The Chippewa left immediately, abandoning two hundred sick and a few well adults to care for them. By then more than a foot of snow lay on the ground and the streams were frozen over, preventing the use of canoes, which the Wisconsin Chippewa jettisoned along the St. Louis River or scrapped to be used as fuel for the frigid nights. Then they set off on foot along the frozen trails eastward, heavily laden with the goods for their families. By the Chippewa’s own reckoning, many more died on the trails home than had died at Sandy Lake.72  The total mortality for this whole sorry episode cannot be determined exactly. Watrous, himself, although sometimes claiming reports of epidemics and starvation were exaggerated, admitted that more than 150 had died at Sandy Lake proper, including twenty of those left in his charge after the Chippewa departed. About two hundred was the estimate of several missionaries present part of the time at the new Sub-Agency during these events, while William W. Warren, a month after the goods distribution, reported that nearly two hundred died at Sandy Lake alone. But the best enumerations were likely those of the Chippewa leaders themselves, for they were totaling up their own deceased kin. Two separate reports from them, one from the elder Psheke [Buffalo] and his fellow leaders at La Pointe in November, 1851, and a second from the interior Wisconsin leaders a year later, agreed that 170 died during the time spent waiting at Sandy Lake, with another 230 dying on the return trip. Most of these were adults, mainly able-bodied men, an especially hard blow to these small populations. Thus, of the population at risk, something less than three thousand, the Ewing-Brown-Ramsey Watrous plan to lure the Lake Superior Chippewa west and trap them there successfully removed some twelve per cent, by killing them. The human loss was one thing: in addition the Chippewa also lost much capital equipment (their canoes), much critical subsistence work and other productive economic activity, and they went further into debt, when they were forced to encumber unpaid and future annuity funds for survival rations.73

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