Henry Hastings Sibley (February 20, 1811 – February 18, 1891) was a fur trader with the American Fur Company, the first Congressional representative for Minnesota Territory, the first governor of the state of Minnesota, and a United States military leader in the Dakota War of 1862 and a subsequent expedition into Dakota Territory in 1863.
Numerous places are named after him, including Sibley County, Minnesota, Sibley, North Dakota, Sibley, Iowa, Hastings, Minnesota, Sibley Memorial Highway, General Sibley Park, and Sibley State Park.
Early life and education
Henry Hastings Sibley was born in Detroit, then part of the Territory of Michigan. His father, Solomon Sibley (1769–1846), was from Sutton, Massachusetts, and a direct descendant of John Sibley, who had immigrated from England to America in 1629. Solomon had moved to Detroit from Marietta, Ohio, in 1798.
Henry's mother, born Sarah Whipple Sproat, was the only daughter of Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, a distinguished officer in the Continental Army, and the granddaughter of Commodore Abraham Whipple of the Continental Navy. Both Sproat and Whipple had received land grants after they lost their fortunes in the American Revolutionary War and were early pioneers in Marietta, Ohio. Sarah was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and attended boarding schools in Bethlehem and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She married Solomon Sibley in Marietta in 1802 at the age of twenty, after which she moved to Detroit.
Henry was the fourth of eight children and second son of Solomon and Sarah Sibley. During the War of 1812, when Henry was just 18 months old, Fort Detroit was surrounded by forces led by British Major General Isaac Brock and Shawnee chief Tecumseh. According to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Sarah Sibley and her children had been placed inside the fort for safety with other families, while Solomon was out in the field commanding a company of militia. Mrs. Sibley was found holding baby Henry in her arms "while with her busy hands she was making cartridges for the soldiers," and four officers, including her cousin, were killed by a cannonball in the adjoining room. After American General William Hull surrendered and Detroit was occupied by the British, Solomon Sibley secured permission to leave. The family then left their home with only a few belongings, traveling "by a dim trail through the forests from Detroit to Marietta, camping out most of the way." They returned to Detroit one year later after its recapture by U.S. General William Henry Harrison and his defeat of the British in the Battle of the Thames.
As a boy, Henry Sibley was educated at the Academy of Detroit, after which he was tutored privately in Latin and Greek for two years by Reverend Richard Fish Cadle, an Episcopal clergyman and classics scholar. Around the age of sixteen, Henry started studying law, because Judge Sibley had hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. After two years, Henry confessed to his father that he found the study of law "irksome" and that he "longed for a more active and stirring life". His parents finally agreed to allow Henry to pursue a career of his own choosing.
Entry into fur trade
On June 20, 1828, at the age of seventeen, Henry H. Sibley left Detroit for Sault Ste. Marie, a prominent fur trading center on both the United States and Canadian sides. His first job was as a clerk working for John Hulbert, whose sutler's store supplied four companies of the U.S. 5th Infantry Regiment, which were garrisoned there. After a few months, he agreed to work as an agent for Susan Johnston, the widow of John Johnston, a Scots-Irish fur trader who had died that year. Mrs. Johnston, also known as Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Woman of the Green Glade), was the daughter of Ojibwe warrior and chief Waubojeeg; mother of three daughters including Native American literary writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft; and mother-in-law of Henry Schoolcraft, a U.S. Indian agent who later became a well-known ethnologist of Native American tribes in the United States.
In the spring of 1829, Sibley entered into an apprenticeship as a clerk and storekeeper for the American Fur Company (AFC) in Mackinac (then known as Michilimackinac). He returned to Detroit to work at the Bank of Michigan during the winter, and then signed a five-year contract with American Fur Company after working there again in the summer of 1830. In 1832, AFC manager Robert Stuart selected Sibley to transact important business for the company, and sent him on a perilous journey back to Detroit in a bark canoe paddled by nine voyageurs. Despite a severe storm, damage to the canoe, and news of a cholera outbreak in Detroit which killed his grandmother, Sibley successfully completed the journey and secured several licenses for the American Fur Company from Michigan Territorial Governor George Bryan Porter. From 1832 to 1833 and again from 1833 to 1834, Sibley was charged with the responsibility of buying supplies for the company via its offices in Cleveland, which required him to canvass rural Ohio and Pennsylvania on horseback in winter.
In 1834, as American Fur Company founder John Jacob Astor prepared to retire, the company was in the midst of reorganization as a partnership, with Astor's chief lieutenant Ramsay Crooks as president and senior partner. Sibley approached Crooks directly and asked to be released from his employment contract with Astor, which ran until 1835, one year early. He explained that his parents "were strongly opposed to [his] longer sojourn in what was little better than a wild Indian country," and that he had been offered much better paying positions as a cashier at two banks, including one in Detroit. However, Crooks rejected Sibley's offer to pay US$1,000 to be released from his contract. Instead, his counteroffer was to include Sibley as a junior partner in the American Fur Company's newly constituted Western Outfit, together with Jean Joseph Rolette and Hercules L. Dousman, who had been running the company's Upper Mississippi Outfit. Sibley would be the regional manager for fur trade with the Dakota north and west of Lake Pepin, based at the mouth of the Minnesota River (then called St. Peter's). Sibley later wrote that he was finally persuaded by Dousman's glowing description of the Minnesota Valley as a hunter's paradise where "woods abounded with bear, deer and other game animals, and the numerous lakes with aquatic fowl of every variety."
Fur trade in Minnesota country In October 1834, 23-year-old Henry Sibley left Mackinac, traveling to Green Bay and up the Fox River, then to the Wisconsin River via a two-mile portage trail. On the Wisconsin River, he found a tiny stern-wheel steamboat which took him to Prairie du Chien. After spending several days at the American Fur Company's Western Outfit headquarters at Prairie du Chien, Sibley traveled the remaining 300 miles of wilderness by horseback. According to his letter to company president Ramsay Crooks dated November 1, Sibley finally arrived in St. Peters (now known as Mendota, Minnesota) on October 28, 1834. During his journey to St. Peters, Sibley was accompanied by Alexis Bailly, whose four trading posts Sibley would take over as head of the company's "Sioux Outfit" the following year. They spent six months together, during which Bailly warned Sibley that "the American Fur Company squeezed its small traders dry then dropped them like useless rinds."
American Fur Company "Sioux Outfit"
Henry Sibley officially took over as head of the American Fur Company's Sioux Outfit in 1835 at the age of 24. The Sioux Outfit was headquartered at St. Peters (now Mendota). The main store in St. Peters served five nearby Mdewakanton Dakota villages, the "mixed-blood" community around Fort Snelling, and groups of Dakota coming from the Cannon and Cedar River valleys to the southwest. Sibley also managed three distant posts at Traverse des Sioux, Lake Traverse, and a third location serving the Sisseton Dakota between the headwaters of the Des Moines and Big Sioux Rivers; these posts were staffed by hired clerks. In addition, the Sioux Outfit had two independent subsidiary traders, including Jean-Baptiste Faribault, Alexis Bailly's father-in-law, who ran a post at Little Rapids (near present-day Chaska), and Joseph Renville, who ran a trading post at Lac qui Parle on the Upper Minnesota River.
Sibley had arrived in the fur traders' "frontier" with a sense of adventure, hoping to earn a quick fortune before triumphantly returning to "civilization". Unfortunately for Sibley, as Bailly had warned, it had already become difficult for traders to turn a profit through the traditional fur trade. Nevertheless, Sibley worked diligently to try to maximize profits, and according to American Fur Company records, the fur trade in Minnesota "was in its most flourishing condition" in the years leading up to 1837.
Whereas fur traders such as Joseph Renville and Hazen Mooers had traditionally rewarded loyal Dakota hunters with generous gift-giving and access to credit, Sibley "sought to transform the fur trade into a completely modern business." He instructed the traders and clerks in his territory to limit credits to powder, lead and shot. Many Dakota hunters complained to Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro about these changes. Hunters from Shakopee's band reported that ever since Sibley had taken over, "they could get 'nothing' from their traders, 'not even a flint much less traps & ammunition.'"
Sibley removed Hazen Mooers, a fur trader who was popular with Sisseton, Wahpeton and Yankton hunters, from his trading post at Lake Traverse which he had run for over 20 years. By the fall of 1835, Sibley and Jean Joseph Rolette had replaced Mooers with Joseph R. Brown, a fur trader who had previously quarreled with Agent Taliaferro for hauling whiskey and owed money to Rolette and the Western Outfit. Sibley was also reportedly concerned about the power and influence of mixed-blood trader Joseph Renville, who had his own stockade and soldiers' lodge at Lac qui Parle, and asked Brown to keep an eye on him.
The steady decline in the wild animal population in the region meant that more and more hunters were competing for scarcer game, and driving herds further north. By 1836, the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota had become more protective of their hunting zones, even refusing access to the Mdewakanton Dakota, who had been hardest hit and now depended entirely on the western hunting grounds. Sibley, whose business relied heavily on collecting furs from the Mdewakantons, made an emergency trip to Traverse des Sioux to broker a solution. He threatened to withdraw all American Fur Company men if the Sissetons and Wahpetons did not allow the Mdewakantons to hunt there.
Government contracts Sibley worked to secure government contracts for the American Fur Company, in part to eliminate potential competition. From 1836 to 1839, Sibley was in charge of operating the army sutler's store at Fort Snelling, in partnership with Pennsylvania newspaper editor and former Indian agent Samuel C. Stambaugh, who had been appointed to the post but had no interest in moving there. By controlling the army sutler's store, the fur traders were confident that they could maintain their local monopoly; otherwise, there would be nothing to stop the Dakota from patronizing the sutler's store at Fort Snelling and using fur pelts to pay for goods. Any losses incurred by the traders would be more than offset by the higher prices they could charge the Dakota. However, the sutler's store proved to be a headache for Henry Sibley, who did not get along with Stambaugh. Business was also highly dependent on the number of troops garrisoned at Fort Snelling. By 1837, the garrison was drastically reduced due to the Second Seminole War in Florida Territory, and many soldiers in the First Infantry Regiment left the fort with unpaid credits.