The Minnesota Historical Society

Date:
1935
Reference:
WA/HMM/CM/Sal/52/79
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Minnesota Historical Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    scouts employed on the frontier thereafter receive considerable attention. Much correspondence deals with a Sioux chief, Drifting Goose, and his band. Dr. Jared W. Daniels, agent James McLaugh- lin, and agent William H. Forbes wrote frequently to him of Indian affairs in Dakota Territory. Other correspondents during the postwar period were Joseph R. Brown, William Crooks, Cushman K. Davis, Ignatius Donnelly, William W. Folwell, Mrs. Jessie Benton Frémont, Thomas M. New- son, John S. Pillsbury, Alexander Ramsey, Joseph Rolette, and Joseph Tassé. Sibley was president of three prominent bodies, the St. Paul Gas Light Company, the board of regents of the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Historical Society, and his cor- respondence is full of information on matters touching them. In 1878 the quo warranto proceedings against the Minnesota Historical Society produced many items relative to the society and its per- sonnel. For the years 1880 and 1881 there is an abundance of material relative to repudiation of the state railroad bonds. In 1886 Sibley served as head of a committee appointed by the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce for the relief of sufferers in the Charleston earthquake, and a folder of papers treats the subject. Sibley was interested in the Younger brothers of Northfield bank robbery fame, and he corresponded with and about them. A box of miscellaneous papers relates to the scourge of grasshoppers in Minnesota, 1873-77, and to the efforts of the state and individuals to relieve the farmers afflicted by their ravages. The collection includes a large number of volumes relating in the main to Indian trade, being ledgers, account books, daybooks, and credit books used by Sibley, his associates at St. Peter’s, and his traders among the Sioux and the Chippewa. A fair number of them include the accounts of Sibley’s retail store with members and offi- cers of the garrison at Fort Snelling and with traders, missionaries, and other whites resident in the region. One volume is a manuscript Seneca lexicon and another is a Sioux lexicon copied by Stephen R. Riggs for Sibley, 1843-44. Four volumes contain copies of Sibley’s letters from 1849 to 1854. One volume is Sibley’s reminiscences of his early life, which has been edited by Theodore C. Blegen and published as The Unfinished Autobiography of Henry Hastings Sibley (Minneapolis, 1932).
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