Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 50, number 3, spring, 1967

              A MISSION TO THE MENOMINEE:

Alfred Cope's Green Bay Diary {Part IV)

Synopsis

TN A BRIEF SPAN of seventeen years the -*- Menominee Indians were, by means of treaties forced upon them in 1831, 1836, and 1848, stripped of the whole of their ancestral lands. In total, the tribe ceded to the federal government twelve and a half million acres of some of Wisconsin's loveliest and most desir¬ able countryside—at a price of about 9V2 cents an acre. Harshest of the three treaties was that of 1848, which the Indians resisted stanchly but futilely. Under its terms the Menominee were given $350,000 for their last remaining tribal holdings and were required to move en masse to 600,000 acres on the Crow Wing River in Minnesota, an area they had visited and cordially disliked.

At the tribe's request the treaty stipulated that $40,000 of the sum to be paid them be set aside as a gift to those persons of mixed Menominee blood who had befriended them in the past. To assure himself that the gift would be fairly distributed, President Zachary Taylor, whose military experiences on the Wis¬ consin frontier had left him with a sympathy for the Indian's plight, appointed a well-to-do, liberal Quaker from Philadelphia, Thomas Wistar, Jr., to serve as commissioner and to oversee the payment. Wistar in turn chose a friend of similar background and convictions, Alfred Cope, to accompany him on the mis¬ sion, and the two arrived in Green Bay in the late spring of 1849. In the diary which he me¬

ticulously kept. Cope has left us a vivid and valuable picture of Indian-white relations in Wisconsin's first year of statehood and of the contemporary social scene.

In previous installments Cope has described his and Wistar's reactions to Green Bay, to the Menominee chiefs whom they summoned to Fort Howard to draw up a list of recipients of the tribe's generosity, to the living conditions of the nearby settlements of the Brothertown and Oneida Indians, and to Wisconsin's sights and sounds. In the preceeding issue (Winter, 1967), Cope, left alone while Wistar journeyed East to pick up the $40,000 in gold specie, filled his diary with commentaries on the local flora and fauna, the habits and appearance of the Menominee, and an account of an Oneida Fourth of July celebration.

As this final installment in the series opens. Cope is preparing to meet with and counsel a group of Oneida friends in his quarters inside Fort Howard. He is also expecting Wistar mo¬ mentarily to return from the East. By now both men were anxious to return to their homes and families, especially in view of recent disquiet¬ ing rumors of a cholera epidemic in Philadel¬ phia. So far the two Quakers had reason to congratulate themselves on the success of their mission: the Indians had been co-operative; what seemed to be an equitable apportionment of the $40,000 had been arrived at; and no obstacle had been placed in their path by the white community. Neither Wistar nor Cope had any inkling of the ludicrous and frustrat¬ ing circumstances that would surround their departure from Green Bay.

W. C. H.

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