American Indian agencies were created to carry out U.S. government Indian policies, and by the mid-1800s agencies like this one stood across the land west of the Mississippi River as part of an effort to assimilate Native people into English-speaking, textbook-educated American society. The Dakota know this place as Pezihutazizi, Where They Dig for Yellow Medicine, where Dakota women grew and gathered foods while men hunted game across a large area. Treaties in 1851 and 1858 reduced Dakota landholdings from millions of acres to small reservations along the southern bank of the Minnesota River, and the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota bands held the reservation land from Lake Traverse to the Yellow Medicine River. Established here in 1854, the Upper, or Yellow Medicine, Agency included comfortable homes for government employees, a school, brick warehouse, stables, and a jail, with trader stores and Christian missions nearby, and the area contained at least 100 houses for Dakota farmers, suggesting progress toward the government’s assimilation goals. Yet resentment over unfair treaties deepened, and when annuities were delayed and food grew scarce, nearly 4,000 Dakota gathered here in early August 1862 demanding payment and food. After the Indian agent distributed some food, tensions briefly eased, but during the six-week U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 most of the agency buildings were looted and burned.