Treaty of Old Crossing - Alexander Ramsey and The Backdrop of The Sioux Uprising

Alexander Ramsey and The Backdrop of The Sioux Uprising

The lead negotiator for the United States in the Treaties of Old Crossing was Alexander Ramsey, a former Governor of the Territory of Minnesota and the first Governor of the new state of Minnesota. In direct response to the Sioux "Outbreak", Ramsey had resigned as governor in order to accept a federal appointment as Indian Commissioner late in the spring of 1863.

When the Old Crossing treaty negotiations were set to resume in 1863, the nerves of settlers, soldiers and politicians were still raw from the panic and fear induced by the Sioux Uprising of the previous summer. Federal and state officials had launched a retaliatory campaign of removal and extermination against the Sioux while tension mounted on the borderlands between whites and all other Indians, which continued throughout the fall and winter of 1862-63. The strained relationship between the Ojibwe bands and the intruding steamboat operators and fur traders grew increasingly testy, as charges and countercharges of trespass and "depredations" went both ways. Rumors of alliances between the Sioux and the Ojibwe were rampant, and fear of a sympathetic "insurrection" by the "whole body of the Chippewa" were widespread.

Governor Ramsey's most notorious accomplishment had been to order a vicious and indiscriminate retaliatory strikes by Minnesota militiamen against various Dakota settlements in reaction to the Sioux Uprising in 1862. In the words of Governor Ramsey,

"Our course then is plain. The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state."

Immediately afterward, all treaties with the Sioux were abrogated by Congressional action, and all Sioux were ordered removed from the state to reservations in Dakota Territory.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1863, Minnesota militiamen under General Henry Sibley, operating on the orders of Governor Ramsey, along with United States forces under the command of General John Pope, were carrying out a series of punitive expeditions against escaping "renegade" Sioux bands throughout the Red River Valley and the Devils Lake and Upper Missouri areas of Dakota Territory. Many of these operations took place less than 100 miles (160 km) from the Old Crossing treaty site.

During the weeks leading up the Old Crossing Treaty, former Governor Ramsey carried out a series of treaty negotiations with Ojibwe tribes in his new capacity as the Indian Commissioner for Minnesota, securing territory throughout the state in exchange for nominal consideration and reservations. Meanwhile, Governor Ramsey's successor, Governor Henry A. Swift, issued a series of executive orders authorizing "bounties" on Indian scalps, some of which did not distinguish between Sioux marauders and others, such as the Pillager, Red Lake and Pembina bands of Ojibwe. Also during the days and weeks preceding the negotiations at Old Crossing, U.S. Cavalry operations ranged up and down the Red River Valley on both sides from Pembina to Ft. Abercrombie. These military operations were directed primarily against the Sioux, but several cavalry detachments also were sent out from Fort Abercrombie and Fort Ridgely in a deliberate attempt to "produce a moral effect on the Pillagers and other Chippewa bands".

It was against this backdrop of fear and intentional intimidation of the Ojibwe as part of the reaction to the Sioux Uprising, that Commissioner Ramsey resumed the quest to gain for United States development interests the territory of the Ojibwe bands in Northwestern Minnesota. This was not Governor Ramsey's first attempt to obtain the cession of the Valley from the Ojibwe. It was he who, accompanied by two companies of dragoons, had induced the Red Lake Band and the Pembina Band to sign the unratified treaty at Pembina in 1851, whereby they had ceded upwards of 5,000,000 acres (20,000 km2) of Red River Valley land to the United States for about five cents an acre.< In the same year, Governor Ramsey also negotiated the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota, whereby the Dakota and certain Ojibwe bands had ceded the vast majority of Minnesota territory south and east of the Red River Valley.