unsold, and in annuity provisions of previous treaties to the amount of over $1,000,000 capital! Is not their long suffering, their patience, well-nigh incredible?
Spite of the dread of being fired on by the United States troops, they continued to make canoes and escape in them from this “new home” in the desert, and in October the Department of the Interior began to receive letters containing paragraphs like this: “I have also to report that small detachments of Winnebagoes are constantly arriving in canoes, locating on our reserve, and begging for food to keep them from starving.”—Agent for Omaha Agency.
These are the men who only one year before had been living in comfortable homes, with several hundred acres of good ground under cultivation, and “clamoring for certificates” of their “allotted” farms—now shelterless, worse than homeless, escaping by canoe-loads, under fire of United States soldiers, from a barren desert, and “clamoring” for food at Indian agencies!
The Department of the Interior promptly reports to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Minnesota this “information,” and calls it “astounding.” The Department had “presumed that Agent Balcombe would adopt such measures as would induce the Winnebagoes to remain upon their reservation,” and had “understood that ample arrangements had been made for their subsistence.” It, however, ordered the Omaha agent to feed the starving refugees till spring, and it sent word to those still remaining on the reservation that they must not “undertake to remove without the consent of their Great Father, as it is his determination that a home that shall be healthy, pleasant, and fertile, shall be furnished to them at the earliest practicable moment.”
This was in the autumn of 1863. In one year no less than 1222 of the destitute Winnebagoes had escaped and made their way to the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska. Here the
