WHILE THE main body of the lower Sioux were adjusting to reservation
life on the Great Plains, a parallel course was being followed by the
upper bands, in a somewhat more northerly setting. In the closing days
of the Sioux Uprising, most of the Sissetons and Wahpetons, though
largely innocent of participation in the massacres, fled before the ad-
vancing military force under General Sibley and scattered over the
plains of Dakota Territory. For the next few years they led a nomadic
life, wishing to re-establish themselves in the good graces of the white
man's government but fearing to give themselves up. Gradually, how-
ever, the bulk of them gathered on the Coteau des Prairies, just west of
the Lake Traverse--Big Stone Lake area, where in the fall of 1864 the
army established Fort Wadsworth, partly for their benefit but chiefly
to protect the frontier. Some Dakota politicians, notably Walter A.
Burleigh and Governor Newton Edmunds, tried to have them removed
to Crow Creek. Failing in this effort, Edmunds, at least, came around
finally to advocating that they be given a reservation on the Coteau
and restored to treaty relationships with the government. ¹

After two inconclusive attempts to negotiate with those bands had
been made in 1864 and 1866, Benjamin Thompson, who had been ser-
ving with the commission to appraise the former reservation lands in

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