The Headwaters War

In the late 1600s and early 1700s the headwaters of the Mississippi was a forested land of lakes and streams, teaming with game; the home of the powerful Dakota branch of the Western Sioux Nation. But it was not to last; another force, the Ojibwe, an Algonquin tribe from the east, were on the move westward along the shores of Lake Superior, and in the late 1600s these two powerful tribes met. At first, through the influence of the French, several decades of peace followed, but in the late 1730s an incident occurred that led a breakdown of that long truce. And so it began; a conflict that raged over much of present day Minnesota and Wisconsin for over a century, not finally settled until the white man imposed its final solution in the late 1800s. My interest in the Mississippi River and Indian culture began early. I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a small town in northern Minnesota bounded on two sides by an Ojibwe reservation, the Mississippi, still a small river, only a mile or two away. Some of my classmates were from that reservation, and, while not sharing their blood, I still count members of the tribe among my relatives. While upon leaving adulthood I moved from that small town, I never really left it. Years later, when I had a family of my own, we purchased a summer cabin on a lake only an hour’s drive from the town where I grew up. A few miles from the cabin, bordering a dirt road, a small Ojibwe reservation consisting of no more than a dozen houses was located on 40 or so acres of land, with perhaps half of that swamps or ponds. There was not even a sign acknowledging the reservation was there, or why. Few realized those few acres of reservation land and small group of homes were all that remained of the once powerful band of Sandy Lake Ojibwe, in its day perhaps the most dominant force in Minnesota, or that Big Sandy Lake (Lac du Sables) was known in European capitols a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Even fewer knew that, in the early 1700s, the lake had been the location of a climatic battle between the resident Dakota and the oncoming Ojibwe; the opening act of over a century of conflict between the two tribes. When we first came to Sandy Lake we also had no conception of its former history. However, one day we came across a small island toward its southern end with a sign commemorating a battle far in the past, in fact the island was named ’Battle Island’. Intrigued, I began to research the lake and region’s early history, and gradually unearthed from musty history books and journals some insight into what it had once been; that for much of the 1700s and into the early 1800s Big Sandy Lake was perhaps the most important and historically significant lake in Minnesota, with that small band of Ojibwe one of the few remnants of that past. The result is this story of the Ojibwe-Dakota conflict for control of the Mississippi headwaters, told in a mixture of history, legend, and historical fiction.