The Agony and Anger of the Eastern Sioux

Abstract

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Sioux nation stretched from Minnesota to the Dakotas and Wyoming. The eastern Sioux tribes, known as the Santee, or in their own language the Dakotas, occupied western Minnesota and the upper Mississippi valley. Between the Mississippi and the Missouri lived the Yanktons and Yanktonais, or Nakotas. West of the Missouri ranged the Teton, or Lakotas, who constituted about half of the entire Sioux population and were themselves divided into seven bands, or subtribes. The Santee Sioux — the Mdewa-kantons, the Wahpetons, the Wahpekutes, and the Sissetons — were the first to come into sustained contact with Americans and the first to endure dispossession and defeat at the hands of the United States. Their experiences in the early 1860s presaged what their western relatives would have to deal with in subsequent decades.