A muggy day at the National Archives two years ago was the most disturbing day I ever spent in scholarly research. All day I plowed through correspondence of military authorities in the Department of the Missouri detailing actions, most of them obscure, in the latter stages of the Dakota War in Dakota Territory.
The situation was confused, and confusing. Armed conflict and refugee movements had scrambled previously discrete peoples of the Oceti Sakowin into synthetic bands. Native and settler alike lived in continual terror of armed and roving companies, who killed one another for inscrutable reasons.
Thanks to a new book from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, I now can reread my notes from that bad day in the archives and make better sense of them. There was, in the fog of war, someone with an emerging vision for a new people in a new place. That someone was Tiwakan, also known as Gabriel Renville.
Now, there are faults to pick on in this book by Gary Clayton Anderson, entitled Gabriel Renville: From the Dakota War to the Creation of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation, 1825-1892. Anderson, an exceedingly distinguished historian, knows Minnesota well, but the Dakota Territory, not so much. He keeps calling it “the Dakotas,” which did not exist, of course, until 1889. He confuses the buffalo robe trade with the buffalo hide trade, two entirely different things. And he makes a shambles of the story of the Sibley Expedition of 1863, likewise the so-called Battle of Whitestone Hill.
My remarks might be taken as touchiness on the part of a Dakotan, except that not getting such things, for instance the story of the Sibley Expedition at Big Mound in 1863, right obscures connections among later events.
Renville, a Sisseton, led Sibley’s Dakota scouts into camp on the alkaline lake we now call Kunkel, preventing a catastrophic battle by debilitating the soldiers’ horses. He and the Christian Wahpeton, Little Paul Mazakutemani, figured in the crucial council that resulted in the shooting of Surgeon Josiah Weiser and ignited the war in the territory.
I bring this up because these same two individuals, Renville and Mazakutemani, were antagonists and rivals in the subsequent history of the Lake Traverse Reservation, home today of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.
In 1864-65 Renville and the scouts he recruited went to work for the army, establishing a line of scouting outposts across eastern Dakota Territory, often fighting their own kinsmen. To their camps, however, gravitated hundreds of refugee Sisseton and Wahpeton. Renville wrote Sibley, “We like this country and if we are to die we will die here.”
It was country centered on the Coteau des Prairies, the Prairie Coteau, a sublime range of hills that bisects the present North Dakota-South Dakota border. Renville’s original scout camp was at a place the soldiers called Skunk Lake. Later usage has reverted to its Dakota name: Tewauken - Gabriel Renville’s name in his native language.
It means, a holy lodge, a sacred home. Here Renville germinated the idea of a new homeland for his people, an idea he crystallized into the Treaty of 1867 and nurtured as principal chief at Lake Traverse. He perpetuated traditions of feasting and giveaways while at the same time nurturing agriculture and adaptation. His memory is ambivalent - but there is no doubt he was a man of vision.
~Tom Isern
