A HISTORY OF DAKOTA

THE BEGINNINGS

The two states of Dakota were once part of the vast Dakotaland, extending from the Mississippi to the Missouri River. Hence, they share with Minnesota in the history of exploration and early settlement. They had peculiarities which marked them as North and South divisions of one Dakota years before the one was made twain. The name was taken from the Dah-ko-tas, of whom nomadic bands bad hanting grounds on the great plains, before the present century. Westward they had held their conquering way, deserving the title of Sioux,' or enemies of the tribes they slaughtered or expelled. They robbed the older robbers, and the fugitives left behind them the mounds and lodgecircles of an older race."

For unrecorded centuries Dakota was a land of life, vegetable, animal and human. So the first white explorers found it. The fur companies gathered wealth from its wilds. It has scarcely a lake or stream or wooded valley that has no romantic story of the daring hunter, the cunning trapper, the shrewd trader and the prudent agent of the Hudson Bay Company, or its more American competitors.

The Red River Valley claims the first log cabin built on Dakota soil. In 1780' a French trader had his post near the plum thickets and the cranberries (nipimina) that gave the Indian name Pembina to it and to the river that winds through the woods of various kinds of trees. The first known English literature' penned under Dakota shades is in the journal of the younger Alexander Henry, who traveled widely for twelve years (17991811) to establish the fur trade. He tells of the buffalo herds, red deer, black and grizzly bears, and the old fort at Pembina, visited by the astronomer, David Thompson. His company sowed garden seeds on the site of "an old fort built by Peter Grant,' years

ago, the first establishment ever built on the (east bank of) Red River."

At Grand Forks, 1801, he found evidence of a large camp of Sioux, lately on the war path. He placed there John Cameron* to establish a trading post, with its mill, canoes, barges and Red River carts whose pristine "wheels were each one solid piece sawed from the ends of trees three feet in diameter." Thus began that now flourishing city. Mr. Henry introduced better horses into that wide valley, if some of the best were not his transports across the plains to the Missouri.

In the lower valley of the Pembina River was part of Lord Selkirk's colony, even after Major Long," in 1823, settled the latitude for them so that their British flag was hauled down. The major found there a motley group, dependent on the fur trade. "There were English, Scotch, French, Italian, Germans, Swiss, half-breeds, and Indians of the Chippewa," Dakota and Crow" nations," living mainly on the buffalo, but also raising small quantities of wheat, corn, barley, potatoes, turnips and tobacco. The only good colonists were the Scotch. The major saw, coming in from their hunt, a procession of "115 carts, each loaded with 800 pounds of buffalo meat, and 300 persons, men, women and children." It was led by twenty hunters, mounted on the best of their two hundred very good horses.

A solid oak post was set on the international line, which so cut the town of sixty houses that only one cabin stood on the British side of it. No record shows how many of these people, and of the Selkirkers in the Pembina Valley, still clung to the shady retreats along that river, where a stone fire-place unearthed here and there, or the ruins of a milldam, scarcely prove desertion to the British flag; but thus began settlement and trade in Dakota," then unnamed and undefined. Romance has been pleased to hear, so early on her soil, "the song of the plowboy and the hum of the spinning wheel wakening echoes in the timber along the Pembina River."

Before this time Mr. Henry had left the Missouri Valley, where he wrote of the Mandans" and their fine cornfields, cultivated by women with a hoe made by fastening a stick to the shoulder blade of a buffalo. He saw a huge pile of bones where three hundred attacking Sioux had been slain. As the guest of

Chief Chat Noir (Black Cat), he was assigned "a hut ninety feet in diameter," over which his honoring host put up the American flag lately given him by Lewis and Clarke."

Soon after the Louisiana purchase, which annexed the Great West to the United States, Captains Lewis and Clarke became leaders in the exploration of the new Northwest." Rowing their skiffs up the Missouri, they reached the mouth of the Teton, opposite the present Pierre, September 24, 1805, and remaining a day to hold a council with the Tetons," "a band of Sioux, the pirates of the Missouri." Very insolent and hostile, the chiefs opposed the movement of the strangers landward until the officers told them that there was smallpox enough on board to kill twenty such nations in a day, and that a boatward move was perilous. Farther up the river the party was invited ashore to accept the hospitality of the Indians-eighty lodges of them-who made a basket-boat of buffalo hides, and in it conveyed Lewis and Clarke to their council house, where they evinced their friendship in a dog-feast and grand dance, with the most rattling music and a stunning display of human scalps.

Although the expedition of Lewis and Clarke gave little scientific information touching the great valley of the Missouri, nevertheless it furnished the most reliable and interesting account of the country, its inhabitants and wild game, that had then been given to the public. It also gave a very correct idea of the great river and its affluents, and was no doubt instrumental in hastening the more perfect exploration and settlement of the country. It also gave a fresh impetus to the fur trade, and pioneered the way for forts and trading posts."

The earliest of the fur companies, that established trading posts on the upper Missouri, was headed by Manuel Lisa," a Spanish gentleman, whose men worked their boats up the current from St. Louis about the year 1814," when the Dakotas heard rumors of the war with Great Britain. With him was a friendly "one-eyed Sioux,"" whose effort to persuade his people to favor the United States was as unsuccessful as most attempts of that kind have been ever since. The Spaniard was the forerunner of Pierre Chouteau," of St. Louis, who conducted the first steamboat to the place which received from him the name, Fort Pierre." It was about three miles above the present Fort Pierre