The Treaty Era, Cessions, Removal, and the Fight to Stay

In eleven years, between eighteen thirty-two and eighteen forty-two, the United States extracted treaty signatures that transferred most of present-day Wisconsin from Indigenous nations to federal ownership. The process followed a pattern that played out across the entire continent: federal commissioners arrived with annuity payments and pressure, often targeting individual leaders rather than the full tribal councils that held authority under Indigenous law. The resulting documents were then presented in Washington as legitimate land sales.

The Ho-Chunk were targeted repeatedly. After the Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two, a conflict in which most Ho-Chunk leaders had tried to stay neutral, American officials used the war's aftermath to demand cessions. A series of treaties through the eighteen thirties pushed the Ho-Chunk west, first to Iowa, then to Minnesota, then to the Crow Creek Reservation in Dakota Territory. Many refused to go. They came back. They were removed again. One Wisconsin historian estimated that some Ho-Chunk families made the journey from Wisconsin to the assigned reservation and back more than once, an act of sustained resistance that had no formal name but required extraordinary resolve.

The Ojibwe signed the Treaty of Saint Peters in eighteen thirty-seven and the La Pointe Treaty in eighteen forty-two. Both treaties ceded enormous territories but, crucially, reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather on the ceded lands 'during the pleasure of the President.' Federal officials later claimed those rights had expired. The Ojibwe disagreed. That disagreement became the Walleye Wars of the nineteen eighties, when Ojibwe spearfishers exercising treaty rights were met at boat landings by mobs with rocks and racial slurs, and federal courts ultimately upheld what the treaties actually said.

The removals were not complete. By eighteen fifty-one the federal government had grown impatient with Ho-Chunk persistence and attempted a forced removal by steamboat from Prairie du Chien. Some families fled into the forest. Those who remained slowly negotiated a land base, purchased, not granted, that became the Ho-Chunk Nation's current territory in the Wisconsin Dells area and beyond. The lesson of the treaty era in Wisconsin is that removal and return can both be true at the same time.