Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country

Chapter Four

There are no surviving images of Margaret McCoy. Photographs of her female descendents—such as daughter Margaret, above—are the closest we can come to imagining how she looked. 04chap4_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:56 Page 106 On January , , the Wisconsin territorial legislature passed An Act for the Relief of Joseph R. Brown, divorcing Brown from his second wife, Margaret McCoy. (Joseph had divorced his first wife in .) Joseph and Margaret claimed residency in Crawford County, a vast region on the territory’s western border that hugged the eastern shore of the Mississippi River past Fort Snelling and north. The legislature stipulated that the parties could divorce if they jointly wrote a separation agreement to be submitted to the Crawford County justice of the peace, dissolving their marriage as if it had never existed, and freeing Joseph and Margaret to marry again. Joseph was directed to provide Margaret with her “widow’s thirds” (one-third of his property, both real and personal) as if he had died, and the legislature stipulated that the pair’s children would remain legitimate even after the divorce. Joseph and Margaret signed their deed of separation—he with his name, she with her mark— on February , ; on August  the deed was certified by the chief justice of the supreme court of the territory, and at : pm on  c h a p t e r f o u r eE Margaret McCoy’s Divorce 04chap4_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:56 Page 107 April , , the deed was“received, certified, and recorded” by the Crawford County registrar of deeds. In the deed, Joseph committed himself to provide for the economic support and education of his children and gave Margaret“two Calves, one Bay Mare, two breeding sows, a dozen Dung-hill fowl . . . improvements made . . . on a claim on the Red Rock Prairie, and three hundred and seventy-five dollars in specie” as her dower.1 Behind these words was an exceedingly complex story. According to the original petition for divorce submitted to the Wisconsin territorial legislature, Joseph had “been from a boy a resident within the Sioux Territory, and for many years past, a trader among said tribe.” Margaret was “a half blood Chippeway . . . [who had] lived among the tribe until within a few years when the Peace that then existed between the tribes induced her father to locate himself near Fort Snelling.” The two were married by missionary Thomas Williamson at Fort Snelling in  but, according to the petition, were prevented from establishing a household together by “war, with all its sorrow, [that] had broken out between the Sioux of Lac Travers and the Chippeways of Red Lake.” Hostilities“rendered it out of the question that one of Chippeway blood could venture unto [Dakota] country ,” yet Joseph was under contract to the American Fur Company: “arrangements . . . compelled him to proceed to Lac Travers, where he was detained until July , during all which time the war continued between the two nations.” More bands of the Dakota and Ojibwe joined the fight in , leading the Browns to conclude that “the war now raging the whole extent of the two nations, precludes the possibility of your Petitioners being able to reside together, unless they should leave the vicinity of both tribes.” Margaret, they argued, would be uncomfortable in a white settlement, “where the manners  making marriage 04chap4_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:56 Page 108 and customs were not familiar to her,” especially since she was “unable to speak the English language,” while Joseph argued that he was “incapable of any business other than the one he now follows” and that giving up the trade would make him“guilty of a breach of faith.” There was no way forward, argued the Browns, save divorce. While “under present circumstances it is impossible we should be together,” they wrote, they hoped the legislature would permit them to avoid becoming “a burden to each other, should either of us be inclined to form other matrimonial connection.”2 Much of this public story of the Browns’ married life was true. Joseph’s presentation of himself as a Dakota trader in a time of immense regional upheaval was truthful; so was his brief description of Margaret’s ancestry and migration in the region. Margaret’s father, Francis McCoy, was an emigrant from Selkirk’s Red River settlement, one of many who preferred to establish a home among the community...