A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity: Dispatches from the Dakota War

Notes

245 NOTES AbbreviATionS AbCfm American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions CwS Oahe Mission Collection, Riggs Family Papers, Center for Western Studies at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota mhS Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota nArA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington dC nmm, mhS Northwest Missions Manuscripts Collection, Minnesota Historical Society hiSToriCAl inTroduCTion 1. Taylor, Tell Me a Story, 6. Taylor’s “tremor half a world and two millennia away” may reference the birth and death of Jesus Christ, making it doubly appropriate for this story. 2. This section is a fictional story woven from historical facts. The thoughts and dream of young Jean (who would grow up to be John Baptiste Renville) are imagined from a Dakota perspective based on his later recollections in the Presbyterian publication the Home Missions Monitor, July 1897, p. 206, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. Details of the interior of Joseph Renville’s house are gleaned from period and archeological records and sleeping arrangements from Ella Deloria’s Dakota Way of Life, vol. 1. The “Doctor” was missionary Thomas S. Williamson, whose rusty continental French was his earliest form of conversation with Renville, who spoke Canadian French. The literate clerk was Roman Catholic. In the Catholic tradition Bible study was the province of priests, not common people, and Williamson recalled that the clerk disliked reading from the Protestant Bible that Joseph Renville Sr. had 246 obtained by mail order from Geneva around the time he settled at Lac qui Parle. “Ikće Wićaṡta,” which means “the common people,” is the name Dakota people use for themselves. “Winter” is used in the Dakota sense of “year.” “Weak womenfolk” was the Dakota conclusion drawn from observing the missionaries sheltering their wives from strenuous work. The stories Joseph Renville told Jean are among Ella Deloria’s translations of Dakota tales in the Franz Boas Papers at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, and among the notes Doane Robinson made of conversations with John Baptiste Renville in Robinson’s papers in the South Dakota State Archives at Pierre. Robinson said that John was “especially well versed in the lore of the Sioux.” Robinson, “Sioux Indian View,” 307. 3. While John’s mother’s name has historically been written as “Tokanne,” the sound is not close to any Dakota word used as a personal name. Dakota place-names in this volume are taken from Durand, Where the Waters Gather. Durand’s work is based on Dakota place-names reported to cartographer Joseph Nicollet in the late 1830s. 4. The standard biography of Taoyateduta (Little Crow IV) is Gary Clayton Anderson ’s Little Crow. Both Anderson and more recent biographer Mark Diedrich, in Little Crow, give detailed genealogies of the Little Crow family. I have chosen not to include a Renville–Little Crow family tree in this volume so as not to perpetuate historical errors. An updated genealogy composed in consultation with descendants of both families is needed. 5. Tokanne’s unnamed sister was the mother of Joseph Napeṡniduta, another of Little Crow’s principal men and an early and staunch ally of acculturation. On Chatka and Napeṡniduta see Stephen R. Riggs and Gideon H. Pond to David Greene, 10 September 1846, nmm, mhS. 6. In June 1944, when Dakota Renville soldiers stormed Normandy on D-Day, they fought their way ashore on the beaches of Calvados, their French ancestral homeland. 7. I am indebted to Steve Misener, who shared Arthur Rainville’s genealogical collection ; to Ed Merk, whose “Ancestors of Margaret Jane Jerome,” privately published in 2009, confirms the Arthur Rainville data; and to Lois Glewwe for compiling both, along with her own data, into “Joseph Renville Family Overview,” in my project files for this book. The Arthur Rainville collection is now at the Chippewa County (Minnesota ) Historical Society. Merk’s data, available online at http://edmerck.tripod.com/ merckfamily/jerome/jeromeancestors.pdf (accessed 27 September 2011), document the descent lines of François Joseph Renville. 8. The American branch of the Rainville family began spelling their surname “Renville” in Joseph Renville Sr.’s generation. However, given that French explorer Joseph Nicollet spelled the name “Rainville” in his diary, it is quite possible that as late as John Baptiste’s generation the name retained the French pronunciation, despite the change in spelling. noTeS To pAgeS 4–5 247 9. In Little Crow, Gary Clayton Anderson draws on the Dakota custom of exogamous marriage...