The source of the following excerpted text is McMahon, Eileen M. and Karamanski, Theodore J. 2002. Time and the River: A History of the St. Croix. National Park Service, Omaha, NE.
The name Dakota (more accurately spelled Dakotah) means: "allies," the designation Sioux, an abbreviation of Nadoues Sioux ("Adders, i.e., enemies"), a name originally applied to them by the Ojibwe. Historically, there were three main divisions of this Indian Nation: Santee, Yankton, and Teton. The Santee Dakota, were the Eastern division and lived in an area that included northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin.
Dakota's ability as warriors, their generosity, and their pride as a nation were all defining characteristics of the first historic inhabitants of the St. Croix valley. The Dakota could afford to be generous because they occupied one of the largest and richest regions of the North American interior. The early French fur trader Nicholas Perrot called it "a happy land, on account of the great numbers of animals of all kinds that they have about them, and the grains, fruits, and roots which the soil there produces in abundance." The St. Croix was the northeastern border of a Dakota homeland that extended along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, from the mouth of the Wisconsin River on the south to the headwater lakes in the north, and along the Minnesota River westward to the Great Plains. Not just its vast extent made this homeland rich. The diversity of landscape at the disposal of the Dakota offered a cornucopia of resources to the nation's hunters and gatherers. The Dakota lands straddled the northern woodlands and transitional prairie ecosystems and were united by rich riverine corridors and pockmarked by countless lacustrine clusters. Only the long hard winters of north central America tempered the possibilities of an otherwise lavish and diverse environment.
"Places are defined," observed historian Elliott West, "in part when people infuse them with imagination." The Upper Mississippi landscape found by European American explorers such as Pike and Schoolcraft was shaped by the choices made by its Dakota inhabitants. Other Indian peoples, such as the Shawnee or the Huron, would have looked upon the rich bottom lands along the Mississippi and envisioned fields of maize, or later white settlers saw commercial lumber in white pine thickly arrayed in ranks along the margins of the northern lakes. The Dakota, however, arranged their homeland as a grand hunting preserve. Like most Native American people's of the Upper Midwest the Sioux structured their lives around a seasonal subsistence cycle. In the case of the Mdewakantonwan this cycle was based on hunting, not the gardening of maize or beans that played an important role in the lives of the Algonkian Indians who dominated the Great Lakes region. Dakota men were hunters and warriors. Fittingly they approached hunting as they approached war, cooperating with other Dakota to overwhelm their prey yet always alert to the possibilities of individual recognition.
The Dakota began their year amid the thousand lakes of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Large lakes of the St. Croix valley, such as Chisago, Pokegama, and Upper St. Croix became the sites of villages of one hundred or more deerskin lodges. Men were active throughout the winter hunting white-tailed deer. Generally able to structure their hunts to suit their palates, the Dakota hunters would alternate the taking of deer with the hunting of winter bears. In winter deer and elk were a bit too lean and therefore dry when cooked to suit the taste of the Dakota. Bear on the other hand were heavy with fat in the winter and when taken and rendered added savor to other meat. Women prepared meals and treated hides. During the late February and March days, when the winter sun formed a crust of ice upon the deep snowdrifts of the forest, the Dakota hunters stalked herds of elk. These graceful grazing animals favored the open prairies during most of the year but retreated to the fringes of the forest when winter was at its worst. Moving swiftly over the frozen snow with their snowshoes the Dakota could take large numbers of elk, as they broke through the surface snow and struggled in the drifts.
The proud hunters were greeted with the cry "Kous! Kous!" as young boys saw the men return to the village burdened with heavy loads of meat. Soon every lodge was empty as the entire community, young and old, rushed out to honor the hunters. The shouts continued to rent the evening air until the men laid down the meat at the door of their lodges. A successful late winter elk hunt became the occasion for a great round of feasting among the Dakota lodges. A hunter established his status in part by forcing upon his guests more food than could be consumed. Eating to the point of nausea was the mark of a true Dakota. When elk hunting failed, as it occasionally did because of a lack of snow, the Dakota relied on fish taken in the adjacent lakes. Like true hunters the Dakota favored spearing fish to the use of nets or hooks, and if their efforts failed or yielded meager results, they accepted a shortage of food as a natural part of the season. Wild plants helped to bridge the rare seasons of want and the more common seasons of plenty. In 1767 Jonathan Carver witnessed the Dakota chewing the soft, inner fibers of "a shrub," perhaps the red willow, which he said tasted "not unlike the turnip."
When the sap of the maple tree began to run, in March or April, the specter of a season of want disappeared. Women took the lead organizing the work of tapping maple trees, gathering sap, and boiling the liquid into sugar. Besides a few old men or boys who might help tend the fires, the sugar camps were composed entirely of women. Most of the men were off trapping or hunting waterfowl. Women united by kinship ties often came together to share the work and fun of making sugar. The sugar camp might be occupied for as long as a month and as many as one hundred trees could be tapped. The hardest part of the sugar making was the preparation of wooden troughs used for boiling. Although the bottoms of these hallowed logs were smeared with mud to retard their burning, exposure to the direct flames of the rendering fires meant that troughs had to be continuously replaced. Such work was well-rewarded when the finished sugar was gathered in birch bark containers and the women of the family held feasts in which bark pans of sugar were passed around for all to enjoy. Amid the laughter and stories that were shared, the women and children joined in jokes and dares. A frequent dare was to see who could drink the most of what one anthropologist called "a revolting concoction," liquid tallow. The tallow was used in small amounts to help process the sugar. Around the sugar campfire some women responded to their challengers by drinking cupfuls. Then everyone awaited the results on the winner, who often became sick or sleepy.
In summer whole villages of Dakota took to their canoes and journeyed down the St. Croix to its junction with the Mississippi. Amid the hills and river terrace prairies just west of the great river roamed herds of buffalo. Before the Europeans came the buffalo ranged throughout the domain of the Dakota and more than any other reason accounted for the abundance that normally marked the life of the Mdewakantonwan Sioux. The Dakota held their summer buffalo hunts on both banks of the St. Croix. Bison ranged throughout western Wisconsin and small herds were even known to graze in the marshy pine barrens of the St. Croix's headwaters region. The most popular place to hunt the buffalo, however, was on the lower St. Croix and along the Upper Mississippi. In 1680, the missionary-explorer Father Louis Hennipen accompanied the members of a village of Mille Lacs Dakota on a buffalo hunt as far south as Lake Pepin, on the Mississippi. There they killed more than 120 bison.
The summer buffalo hunt was a defining cultural experience for the Dakota of the St. Croix valley. The buffalo provide the means and the rationale for the Dakota community. In contrast to many of their Algonkian neighbors who lived much of the year in small groups of only several families, the Dakota lived in villages composed of hundreds of people. The village functioned as a unit, not as a congregation of individual hunters. This discipline was established by the requirements of the buffalo hunt. "They assemble at nightfall on the eve of their departure," the fur trader Nicholas Perrot observed, "and choose among their number the man whom they consider most capable of being the director of the expedition." This master of the hunt and his adjutants assigned each man his role in the coming endeavor, scout, shooter, or as a policeman enforcing tribal discipline. Unlike the popular image of a Sioux buffalo hunt, with hunters racing over the plains on horseback, shooting their prey, the Dakota approached the hunting grounds via birch bark canoes. Upon the receipt of reports from the scouts the leader would quietly dispatch the hunters, sometimes with the use of smoke signals, who would drive the herd toward its destroyers. Hennepin witnessed two hundred men converge on a buffalo herd from opposite slopes of a large hill. The two groups of hunters "shut in the buffalo whom they killed in great confusion." Sometimes the bison could be driven by means of prairie fires over a high riverbank and dispatched in that way. The traditional technique of the Dakota buffalo hunt was a group effort leading to a massive slaughter of game. The aftermath of such a hunt, the ground packed with bleeding animals in their death throes, might strike modern readers, as it did the nineteenth century artist Paul Kane as "more painful than pleasing," but such a sentiment would have been foreign to a hunting people like the Dakota.
The excitement of the hunt slowly gave way to the drudgery of processing the harvest of meat and hides. In the disciplined structure of the Dakota buffalo camp much of this work fell to the women. Some were given the task of quartering and butchering the bison. Others may have been regarded as specialists preparing hides that would become blankets, clothing, and crucial to the Dakota's mobility -- tents. The most laborious task of the women was the drying of thousands of pounds of meat. This was done over slow burning fires with heat, smoke and sun joining to preserve thin strips of buffalo for up to a year. So important was this task that the prudent hunt leader never selected a kill site far removed from a large supply of firewood. It often took weeks to properly dry and store the meat of a single large kill.
A successful buffalo hunt provided the Dakota with security from want for the remainder of the year. Hunters continued to pursue game throughout the year, including buffalo. But the July hunt was purposely designed to produce not fresh meat for the moment, but an insurance policy for the rest of the year. The Mille Lacs Dakota with whom Hennepin lived in 1680 were particularly scrupulous to husband their harvest for the future. The Frenchman observed that "The women buucanned [dried] the meat in the sun, eating only the poorest, in order to carry the best to their villages, more than two hundred leagues from this great butchery." " So fundamental was this hunt to the prosperity of the Dakota that hunt leaders were given extraordinary powers to ensure that nothing or no one endangered the community endeavor. Hennepin encountered one group of Dakota celebrating an early buffalo hunt. They arrived ahead of the rest of the village and rather than wait, made a large killing on their own. The hunters of the main party were furious and destroyed the early arrival's lodges and took all of their meat. One of them explained to the priest "having gone to the buffalo-hunt before the rest, contrary to the maxims of the country, any one had the right to plunder them, because they put the buffaloes to flight before the arrival of the mass of the nation."
In late summer the Dakota would return to the northern lakes. Men would hunt waterfowl and deer, while the women prepared for the vital harvest of wild rice. The rice harvest was second in importance to the buffalo for the prosperity of the Dakota. The Upper St. Croix country excelled as a habitat for the tall aquatic grass known as wild rice. Early French explorers, such as Nicholas Perrot, described the plant as "wild oats," which was actually more accurate because it is not a rice at all but an annual cereal grass. In later years the European-American fur traders labeled the St. Croix valley as the "Folle Avoine country," using the French words for wild rice to characterize the region. The dam on the St. Croix River at Gordon, Wisconsin destroyed one of the finest wild rice habitats in the region when it flooded the marshy shores of the natural river to create a large recreational lake known as the St. Croix Flowage. For generations before the dam Indian women relied on this rich stretch of river. Dakota women would sometimes seed lake or stream shores to increase their future harvests, but the majority of the wild rice crop grew naturally. Harvesting the crop so as to ensure its return the next year and processing it as a food source required considerable ingenuity and long hours of work. Women gathered the rice in a canoe in which they carefully shook the grain from the tops of the grass, often by means of a wooden stick, so as not to damage the plant. Once a canoe load was brought ashore. "The rice was then separated from the chaff by scorching it in a kettle," recalled an early Minnesota settler, "and then beating it in a mortar made by digging a circular hole in the ground and lining it with deer skin."
Prior to the eighteenth century agriculture seems to have played a very small part in Dakota life. The amount of wild rice available in the homeland of the Mdewakanton Sioux assured a steady source of natural cereal. Small plots of corn were sometimes planted near village sites, but the amount was never enough for maize to serve as a sustaining element in their diet. Its role seems to have been as a source of diet variety. Similarly they would establish plots of tobacco near their villages. Most of what the Dakota desired was obtained by hunting or through the gathering of wild plants.
Included on this website with written permission from the National Park Service.