The Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, signed on July 23, 1851, at Traverse des Sioux in Minnesota Territory, resulted from the United States government's desire to acquire Dakota lands in the upper Mississippi River region. The treaty was instigated by Alexander Ramsey, the first governor of Minnesota Territory, and Luke Lea, Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., with assistance from territorial Congressional delegate Henry Hastings Sibley and traders seeking compensation for business losses recorded as "Indian debts." The push for this land cession was preceded by Governor Ramsey's failed attempt in the fall of 1849 to purchase land from the Dakota, when he had initially offered less than three cents per acre—an offer that failed to gain interest among Dakota leaders.
The treaty was negotiated between the United States government and the Upper Dakota Sioux bands, specifically the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota bands. Through this land cession treaty, these Dakota bands sold 21 million acres of land in present-day Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota to the United States government.
Ramsey and Lea justified both the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the concurrent Treaty of Mendota to Congress based on an "overwhelming tide of migration...increasing and irresistible in its westward progress." The treaty resulted in the Dakota ceding vast territories for $1,665,000, facilitating American westward expansion during the mid-nineteenth century and significantly reducing Dakota land holdings in the region.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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