“Suppose your grandfather wanted your country, and he didn`t want a contract for your good, he could come with 100,000 men and drive you out into the Rockies.” The Sioux have many separate tribal governments, spread over several reserves and communities in North America: the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska and Montana in the United States; Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada. Today, many Sioux live outside their reservations. 1837: At Fort Snelling, the Ojibwe surrendered their lands north of the 1805 zone to the U.S. government in exchange for cash, payment of merchant debts, and annual payments of cash and property or pensions. Events were quickly postponed. 44 Americans were killed and ten others were captured on the first full day of fighting in and around the Lower Agency in Redwood. Nearly two hundred more whites died in the days that followed when Dakota massacred farm families and attacked Fort Ridgely and the city of New Ulm. Panicked settlers fled the 23 counties to the east, so that the southwestern border of Minnesota, with the exception of the barricaded fortifications at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, was largely depopulated. On 23 August, a second attack from the Dakota to Neu-Ulm left most of the city, and 2,000 refugees, mostly injured women, children and men, set off in wagons and on foot for Mankato, 30 miles away. On August 26, three days after Governor Alexander Ramsey appointed Colonel Henry Sibley, a former governor, commander of U.S. forces that tried to suppress the insurgency, Sibley advanced with 1,400 eastern troops toward Fort Ridgely. The next day, Sibley and his men successfully lifted the siege of Fort Ridgely in Dakota, and the second phase of the Dakota conflict — an organized U.S.
military effort to defeat and punish Sioux — began. Article of a treaty concluded on July 23 between the United States of America, between the United States of America, between Luke Lea, Commissioner for Indian Affairs, and Alexander Ramsey, Governor and Official Superintendent of Indian Affairs in that region, and concluded, and See-see-toan and Wah-pay-toan Bands Dakota or Sioux Indians … The causes of the Dakota conflict are multiple and complex. The treaties of 1851 and 1858 helped create tensions by undermining Dakota culture and the power of chiefs, concentrating discontent and creating a corrupt system of Indian agents and traders. Annuity payments have reduced once proud Dakota to the status of drug addicts. They reduced the power of chiefs because pensions were paid directly to individuals and not through tribal structures. They created bitterness because licensed merchants sold goods to Indians with 100% to 400% profits and often paid “receivables” for individual Dakota money from tribal funds. Dakota, wrongly convicted, did not receive an effective remedy, which led some Dakotas to talk about another option open to them: theft and violence.