Lawrence Taliaferro, the wealthy scion of a politically connected, slave-owning Virginia family, was the US government’s main agent to the Native people of the upper Mississippi in the 1820s and 1830s. He earned the trust of Dakota, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Menominee, Sauk (Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) leaders through lavish gifts, intermarriage, and his zeal for battling predatory fur traders. In a series of treaties, he persuaded these leaders to cede tracts of land in exchange for promises that the government would later break.
Lawrence Taliaferro was born in 1794 on a plantation in King George County, Virginia. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, he enlisted as a volunteer militiaman. Before turning twenty, he had earned an Army commission. He served on the Niagara frontier, rising to the rank of first lieutenant and helping prepare for the American invasion of Canada.
In 1819, at the request of his “patron friend” President James Monroe, Taliaferro agreed to quit the Army and start a new career heading the St. Peters Indian Agency in the future state of Minnesota. For the next two decades, he would be the US government’s principal diplomat to the region’s Native American nations. Dakota and Ojibwe people would travel hundreds of miles to visit him in his log council house just west of Fort Snelling.
Taliaferro relied heavily on the labor of enslaved people. Over his lifetime, he owned twenty-one African American men and women. In 1836 he officiated the marriage of Harriet Robinson, who had worked in his house, to Dred Scott. Slavery was illegal in the Upper Mississippi Valley, and the Scotts later used their Fort Snelling residency as a legal basis for their freedom in the US Supreme Court case Scott v. Sandford. Taliaferro would free all his remaining slaves before his death.
A proud, methodical bureaucrat, Taliaferro became admired among Native Americans for his dependability and his candor. The Dakota leader Ta Oyate Duta (His Red Nation, also known as Little Crow) once told him there’s “no sugar in your mouth.” Taliaferro handed out gifts of guns, vermilion, tobacco and blankets to Native leaders. He launched a vaccination campaign and spent thousands of dollars of his own money on flour and meat for the poor. He turned down bribes from fur traders and risked his life enforcing trade laws and exposing fraud and extortion.
Taliaferro also extended his influence through kinship ties by hiring Native and métis staff at the Indian Agency and by marrying the daughter of the Dakota leader Mahpiya Wicasta (Cloud Man). Their daughter, Mary, was born in 1828, and Taliaferro paid for her education.
At Taliaferro’s urging, Mahpiya Wicasta established a farming village on the eastern shore of Bde Maka Ska in August 1829. Taliaferro dispensed seeds, ploughs, and other tools, and by 1835, the hundred-member community grew squash, potatoes, cabbage and corn. Taliaferro was vexed when some Dakota villagers, following their cultural norms, gave their surplus harvest to relatives.
Despite his intimate admission into the life of Native communities, Taliaferro retained the worldview of the colonizer. He never became fluent in the Dakota language, and he speculated in his autobiography about the inscrutable “savage heart.” A believer in European superiority, he thought Native people needed to abandon their traditional way of life, convert to Christianity, and assimilate into Western society to survive.
Taliaferro used the trust he built to cajole Native leaders into abandoning their ancestral land rights. In three 1837 treaties, he helped pressure Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk leaders into ceding all their land east of the Mississippi River.
The treaties proved disastrous for the Native signers. Much of the settlement money was earmarked toward farming tools, missionary schools and fur traders’ pockets. Annuity payments were late and incomplete, and, to Taliaferro’s dismay, the US government did little to defend Natives’ hunting and fishing rights or to protect them from the white man’s “stupendous frauds” and “thirst for gold.”
The treaties’ shaky rollout cost him his influence among Native leaders, and he resigned his post in 1839. He moved to Bedford, Pennsylvania, rejoined the army as a quartermaster, and served as county treasurer. He died in 1871 at age seventy-seven.