monotony of reservation life for the rest of the nineteenth century and
on into the twentieth. Although their history after 1862 contains less
drama and excitement than the earlier period, when painters, authors,
and just plain tourists sought the upper Mississippi and recorded what
they found, it does not deserve the oblivion into which it has been
allowed to fall. If for no other reason, it is a story that needs to be told
for the light it can shed on our Indian policy in the past century. The
Santees were in some respects quite different from their brethren on the
Great Plains, and at the time of their expulsion from Minnesota they
had traveled much farther on the road toward acculturation than had
those western Sioux when the latter were first induced to gather near
agencies in 1869. The story of the Santees during the last thirty years of
the nineteenth century therefore contrasts sharply with that of the
Tetons in the same period.

The first six chapters of this book deal with the Santee Sioux as sub-
tribes, or bands, with emphasis on the Mdewakantons, since the infor-
mation on them is relatively more copious than on the other three.
From 1863 on, however, the reservation rather than the tribal division
became the functional unit in relations between the United States
government and the Santees, and so they are discussed reservation by
reservation. Those of the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes--the lower
Sioux--who surrendered or were captured wound up on the Santee
Reservation in Nebraska, from which a few courageous souls later fled,
some to the valley of the Big Sioux River near Flandreau, South
Dakota, others to their old homes in Minnesota. The Sissetons and
Wahpetons, known as the upper Sioux, were placed on the Sisseton
Reservation in northeastern South Dakota and on the Devils Lake
Reservation in North Dakota. A few Sioux remained in Minnesota and
became the nucleus of the colonies that formed as people from the
Santee Reservation returned.

Not all the Santee Sioux who fled Minnesota in 1862 are accounted
for in the foregoing list of reservations and settlements, however. Some
joined the western Sioux and were absorbed by them; others settled on
what became the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana and ultimately
disappeared into the population of Tetons, Yanktons, and Assiniboins;
still others crossed the Canadian border and never returned, their de-
scendants today remaining on small reserves in Manitoba and Saskatch-
ewan. None of these groups were numerous, and none receive more than
passing mention in this book. A more numerous body to which this
book gives only casual treatment consists of those Santees who have left

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