a conference with the more appreciative Captain (later General) J. B. S. Todd. The result was that in December, Captain Todd took Picotte, Struck-by-the-Ree and other great Sioux on one of those trips to Washington, so long in vogue. They remained there nearly four months, and would have returned in vain had not Picotte and the big chief overcome the objections of the Sioux majority to the treaty. "I am satisfied," said Picotte, "that we would have been the first Sioux to fight the whites instead of the Santees, if it had not been for that treaty. As it was, we came pretty near having a fight before the treaty was ratified." White men would come over from Nebraska and put up houses, sometimes in the night, at Yankton, Vermillion and elsewhere. He had frequently to warn them off with a threat to burn their shanties.

In June, 1859, the village of Struck-by-the-Ree was lively. A rude frame covered with tarpaulin was the beginning of Dakota's first Indian agency of the government type. In it were the goods for the 2,600 Yankton Sioux who were there to receive their first annuities. Agent A. H. Redfield did not make the terms of the treaty quite clear enough to most of them. Their hunger was not so apparent as it is on more modern ration days. Game was more plentiful. Their hunting grounds seemed to be more valuable as wild land. They came near to a downright refusal of the treaty. "But," says Picotte, "I advised them to accept it just as it was, and by a good deal of talking and explaining kept them down." They assented, received their funds and goods, and in their tents smoked the pipe of peace. Major Redfield took rest under his tarpaulin, and there began white Yankton.

Thus was secured for white settlers the land between the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers, from their junction to Medicine Butte near Pierre; thence northeast to a point near the present Redfield, on the James River, and thence east to the Big Sioux, where Watertown almost hears the plash of the crystal Lake Kampeska, except the Yankton reservation" on the Missouri River. Picotte held 640 acres, part of which became lower Yankton, and there lived as a medal-made-chief by favor of President Buchanan. He was no longer to warn off claim hunters, who rushed in, scarcely waiting until the moving bands of Yanktons were out of sight, for the coming settlers had the rights

of pre-emption and homestead. Among the first residents of Yankton were General Todd, G. D. Fiske, 0-2 and others whose names appear in the counties of Hanson," Edmunds, Burleigh, Ziebach and Stutsman." Other new towns have given us "names that adorn and dignify the scroll whose leaves contain their country's history."

40.4

40_5

It was the privilege of intelligent pioneers to talk of selfgovernment, with a laudable ambition. An event impelled them to act. It was the shearing off from Minnesota when it became. a state, March 1858, of all the country west of its present lines. The two thousand settlers, quite evenly distributed in the six present counties of Pembina, Minnehaha, Union, Clay, Yankton and Bon Homme, were about all the white Dakotans then claiming citizenship. And of what were they citizens? For three years Dakota was without legal name or existence, and their laws were simply the acts of congress, in which they had no representative.".

The first document printed in Dakota was a notice, small in form, but great in assumptions of facts and of right. It ran: "At a mass convention of the people of Dakota Territory, held in the town of Sioux Falls, September 18, 1858, all portions of the territory being represented, it was resolved and ordered that an election be held for members to compose a territorial legislature. Dakota Democrat Print, Sioux Falls City." The said Democrat, the first newspaper in Dakota, had not yet sent out its first number, but there was no partiality in making it "the official organ" of the body thus ordered elected, and in that fall convened in the aforesaid town. A provisional legislature could not legislate into authority, though it did elect certain state. officers provisionally, e. g., Henry Master," governor. This process of holding such a legislature was repeated the next year. The main results were petitions to the national legislature for territorial organization; the election of J. P. Kidder as delegate to congress; the persistent earnestness of nearly 600 men assembling twice at Yankton in the winter of 1860-1, and signing a new petition for the one great object; the passage of the Organic Act in February, and the approval of it, March 2d, by President Buchanan.