St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 1:
Valley of Plenty, River of Conflict (continued)

French Fur Traders on the St. Croix

By the beginning of the eighteenth century regular access to firearms had become vital to the Dakota. French fur traders pushing up the Mississippi River had armed their traditional enemies in the Illinois country, while the coureurs de bois of the Great Lakes region had provided enemies to the east, such as the Fox, with muskets and powder. Those enemies and the remoteness of the Dakota lands frustrated the efforts of early French traders to establish themselves among the Eastern Sioux. The first European to enter the Dakota lands along the St. Croix was Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luth. In 1679 the explorer claimed the region for France, offered gifts to the eager Dakota. At the mouth of the St. Croix he secured the release of Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollet missionary whom they had taken prisoner on the Mississippi. Duluth made the first recorded passage of the Bois Brule–Saint Croix portage that allowed passage from Lake Superior to the Mississippi valley, a route he likely learned about from the Chippewa at La Pointe.

The name of the St. Croix River dates from this early period of French activity in the Upper Mississippi region. Hennepin tried to fix on it the name Riviere du Tombeau, or River of the Grave, after the Dakota buried a snakebite victim on its bank. That name did not take, nor did one that appeared on several early maps, Riviere de la Madeleine. Many stories concerning the name St. Croix link it to the early missionaries. One story of its evolution credits the name to French priests, who saw the shape of a holy cross in the river's right angle junction with the Mississippi. Another version attributed the name to a rock formation on the bank of the river in the Dalles that appeared to have the shape of a cross. Other than Hennepin, who tried to put a morbid name on the river, the only other early missionary to see the river was the Jesuit Gabriel Marest. He was a missionary to the Dakota and witness to Nicholas Perrot's vainglorious ceremony of "taking possession" of the region in 1689. In that ceremony Perrot claimed "in his Majesty's name" a vast track of land stretching westward from Green Bay, including "the rivers St. Croix and St. Peter, and other places more remote." The use of the name St. Croix at so early a date suggests the river may indeed have been named, like the St. Peter's River, by missionaries. The more widely accepted story of the origin of the name credits it to a French fur trader named St. Croix or Croix who allegedly was wrecked or drowned at the mouth of the river. This story dates from Benard de la Harpe's 1700 account of Pierre Charles Le Suer's journey a year earlier up the Mississippi to the Minnesota River valley. "He left on the east of the Mississippi, a great river," La Harpe wrote, "called St. Croix, because of Frenchman of that name was wrecked at its mouth." While the exact origin will never be known for sure, the name St. Croix is one of the earliest European places names in the upper Midwest region. [18]

Other missionaries and traders followed and a series of trading posts were temporarily established in the late 1600s and early 1700s along the Upper Mississippi or lower Minnesota rivers. Each venture, however, failed due to distance and the opposition of the Fox, who attacked posts and hindered resupply efforts. In 1695, Tiyoskate, a Dakota emissary to the Governor General of New France, with carefully staged tears in his eyes, implored, "All the nations had a father who afforded them protection; all of them have iron." He concluded by describing himself as a "bastard in quest of a father." Although the Governor was stirred to grandiloquently promise Tiyoskate the "iron" tools and weapons, Dakota trade contacts remained intermittent. All of which served to make the alliance with the Chippewa more important to the Dakota. [19]

The Sioux made French efforts to extend trade to them more difficult by refusing to forgo their wide-ranging military campaigns. With the firearms they were able to obtain the Dakota ravaged the Illinois country. In 1700, French officials encountered Piankashaw Indians in Illinois who were attacked by recent Dakota raids. They had been so devastated by this event that they were unwilling to risk retaliation. This aggressive approach to their southern frontier even extended to French traders moving north from Illinois, whom the Dakota routinely robbed, as they were regarded as allies of the Illini, Miami, or Piankashaw. This vigorous approach to war, together with the large number of warriors the Sioux were traditionally able to marshal for war inclined the French to refer to the Dakota as the "Iroquois of the West." [20]

But the power of the Dakota began to ebb in the early eighteenth century. As early as the seventeenth century the Sioux were divided into two distinct groups. In 1680, Father Louis Hennepin described one subdivision of the Sioux as the "Tinthonha (which means prairie-men)." Pierre Charles Le Sueur, who attempted to establish a trading post (just below the mouth of the St. Croix) among the Sioux in 1694, distinguished between the "Sioux of the West," who resided along the Minnesota River and the "Sioux of the East," who dwelled along the Upper Mississippi. During the late 1600s the western Sioux began to expand from the Upper Minnesota River, over the plains to the Upper Missouri River country. This historic migration would in the course of the next century bring the bulk of the Sioux from the forest to the grasslands. The birchbark canoe was gradually forsaken in favor of the horse, which the Sioux began obtaining by trade around 1707. Buffalo hunting went from being one part of the annual seasonal cycle, dictated by the arrival of bison herds along the Upper Mississippi, to the sustaining food source available year-round to hunting villages made mobile by the horse. [21]

Like all movements of peoples this one resulted from both a perception of opportunity and the dictates of necessity. As warriors the Sioux were engaged in conflict on all of their frontiers. Opponents to the north, south, and east were all as well or better armed than the Sioux. To the west, however, were Indian peoples whose trade contacts with European fur traders were inferior to those of the Sioux. Nor was the population size of the Upper Missouri peoples as formidable as Wisconsin, which became densely populated with Indians fleeing the Iroquois. Although the Sioux appear to have been largely successful in defending their large rich homeland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the soft frontier to the west drew aggressive Sioux warriors out on to the plains. Another factor was the opportunity to secure buffalo seemingly at will. The buffalo hunt was a defining cultural element among all the Sioux, their grand group experience. To build a lifestyle around it must have been alluring. Particularly because, hunting options in Minnesota may have declined at the critical time of the move on to the plains. In 1717 and 1718, French traders noted that animal populations south and west of Lake Superior declined due to an unknown disease. "All the elk were attacked by a sort of plague, and were found dead," according to one report. Indians who ate the flesh of the infected animals also died. There is evidence that by the 1730s even the eastern most Dakota, the Mdewakantons, were forced to substantially increase their reliance on buffalo hunting, perhaps due to a decline in the elk herds. If buffalo was becoming the dietary backbone of many Sioux, the movement on to the plains made economic sense. [22]

Figure 3. Items fashioned by Chippewa craftsmen from the northwoods environment. Neither the Chippewa nor the Dakota were dependent upon the fur trade for survival in the St. Croix valley. From Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Travel Through the Norhtwestern Region of the United States, 1821.