Native American Communities

The Dakota and Ojibwe depended on their skill in using natural resources, making their own clothing, homes, and tools and gathering, hunting, and growing food as semi-nomadic people who moved from camp to camp with the seasons. In early spring they processed maple syrup into maple sugar in sugar bush camps, in summer they gathered berries, nuts, roots, and wild greens, tended small gardens of corn, beans, and squash, and maintained outpost fish camps around their base camps, and in fall they gathered in ricing camps when wild rice was ready to harvest. Each summer the Dakota traveled south for annual buffalo hunts, while moose, elk, deer, bear, and small game were hunted in all seasons. From 1679 to 1736 the two tribes co-existed peacefully, with the Dakota allowing smaller bands of Ojibwe access to hunting land in exchange for trade goods obtained from French fur traders, and frequent contact led to trading, intermarrying, participating in ceremonies together, and creating a common language. As greater numbers of Ojibwe migrated south along the St. Croix River, tensions over territory, food supply, and fur trading grew into war, and about 1770 a major battle ended with an informal boundary between Dakota and Ojibwe territories near the mouth of Minnesota's Snake River and Grantsberg, Wisconsin. Skirmishing continued into the early 1800's as Ojibwe incursions spread farther south to the headwaters of the Apple River, with some raids reaching Prescott. From 1825 to 1854, both tribes, burdened by debt to fur trading companies and by environmental degradation that was depleting their way of life, signed treaties ceding their land to the United States federal government and opening it to logging and European settlement.

Houlton, Wisconsin · United States