of the homes allotted to them under the provisions of their treaty.
“The trust lands belonging to the tribe have been placed in the market, and from the amount already sold has been realized $82,537 62. An appraisement has also been had of the lands of the diminished reserve, and the same will soon be placed in the market.”
In the Report of the Superintendent of the North-west Territory for the same year is the following summing up of their case: “The case of these Winnebago Indians is one of peculiar hardship. Hurried from their comfortable homes in Minnesota, in 1863, almost without previous notice, huddled together on steamboats with poor accommodations, and transported to the Crow Creek Agency in Dakota Territory at an expense to themselves of more than $50,000, they were left, after a very imperfect and hasty preparation of their new agency for their reception, upon a sandy beach on the west bank of the Missouri River, in a country remarkable only for the rigors of its winter climate and the sterility of its soil, to subsist themselves where the most industrious and frugal white man would fail, five years out of six, to raise enough grain upon which to subsist a family. The stern alternative was presented to this unfortunate people, thus deprived of comfortable homes (on account of no crime or misdemeanor of their own), of abandoning this agency, or encountering death from cold or starvation. They wisely chose the former; and after encountering hardships and sufferings too terrible to relate, and the loss of several hundred of their tribe by starvation and freezing, they arrived at their present place of residence [the Omaha Agency] in a condition which excited the active sympathy of all who became acquainted with the story of their wrongs. There they have remained, trusting that the Government would redeem its solemn promise to place them in a position west of the Missouri which should be as comfortable as the one which they occupied in Minnesota.
