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Wolf Chief, the “Irrepressible Letter Writer”: Native American Activism through Correspondence in the Early Reservation Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2026

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Justin Gage*
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University of Arkansas , Fayetteville, AR, USA
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Abstract

The early reservation years of the late nineteenth century comprise a period of intellectual mobility and activism for Native Americans. This article argues that the thousands of letters written by western Native Americans to non-Natives during this period were a consequential weapon against U.S. colonialism. By highlighting the history of Wolf Chief, a determined Hidatsa activist, this article reveals the many strategies of Native Americans who wrote to U.S. presidents, officials, newspapers, and others to decolonize their lives, seek justice, counteract colonial abuses, and preserve a sense of self-determination. U.S. policy makers hoped that a more literate Native population would be transformed, that educated Indians might understand the virtues of Americanization, and that literacy might quell opposition to U.S authority. Instead, Native Americans used the written word in the early reservation years to challenge a massive colonial apparatus in ways that scholars have not recognized. Wolf Chief’s advocacy from the Fort Berthold Reservation was rooted in the conviction that the Three Tribes deserved a meaningful role in shaping their own futures and protecting their autonomy. His wide-ranging correspondence emphasized the importance of including Native perspectives in the management of reservation affairs, as he believed that effective solutions required the active involvement of his people.

Keywords

Native American historyIndigenous activismNative American intellectual historyAmerican Westsettler colonialism

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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , First View , pp. 1 - 22
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE).

In 1891, the Indian Affairs agent at the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota grew frustrated with a Hidatsa man’s ability to challenge the agent’s authority with pen and paper. The man was Wolf Chief, and he was just one of the 950 Hidatsas (Nuxbaaga), Mandans (Nueta), and Arikaras (Sahnish) living under colonial control on that reservation. Wolf Chief, who was not a chief, had been writing letters to important white Americans for over a decade, advocating for the freedoms of those three tribes (now the Three Affiliated Tribes), trying to improve their lives. He called out the injustices of reservation life, but the Fort Berthold agent, Major John Murphy, had enough of Wolf Chief’s efforts. Largely due to Wolf Chief’s letters to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Murphy had been suspended twice during the previous year. Murphy was shocked that Wolf Chief’s letters, and his thoughts therein, were making a difference. After Wolf Chief’s latest charges against the agent, Murphy wondered to the commissioner how “one letter from one poor, ‘lone’ Indian has an effect upon the Department that five lucid letters and reports from me had not. This seems truly ‘passing strange.’”Footnote 1

Wolf Chief’s success required more than just one letter. Persistence was key. He began writing to U.S. officials in 1881, sending three letters to the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., that year, but Wolf Chief faced a resolute colonial bureaucracy. His three letters were among 22,688 other pieces of correspondence received by the commissioner in 1881, mailed from all over the United States. That correspondence, most all sent by white Americans, was essential to the day-to-day operations of reservations. Letters tied the components of the massive reservation system together. Indian Affairs agents, scattered across the West, stayed tethered to federal administration. The U.S. Army and Indian Affairs collaborated through the mail to suppress tribal power. Suppliers, railroad men, and other businessmen who profited from the reservation system wrote to make their deals. Missionaries and school superintendents received their instructions from the commissioner while keeping him apprised of their assimilationist goals. This correspondence was the engine that kept the colonial wheels spinning.

Some, though, hoped to slow the wheels. Not all of the commissioner’s incoming mail advanced U.S. government policies. Native Americans authored more than one hundred of those 22,691 letters in 1881. One hundred letters against the weight of many thousands may seem insignificant, but they made a difference. And, over time, an incredible number of letters from Native Americans at western reservations made their way into the hands of the commissioner of Indian Affairs and into the hands of U.S. presidents, congressmen, and other officials. Newspaper editors, businessmen, reformers, and other prominent white Americans were also recipients. Wolf Chief, like other Native Americans, understood how much white society and its institutions relied on the written word, and how Indian lives were regulated by stacks of papers coming in and out of the Indian Office in Washington, D.C. Wolf Chief could position his people’s own designs into those stacks from across the continent. It was an effort toward self-determination. Because of his persistence, the Bismarck Tribune labeled Wolf Chief the “irrepressible letter writer.”Footnote 2

U.S. policy makers hoped that a more literate Native population would be transformed and that educated Indians might understand the virtues of Americanization, thus quelling opposition to U.S. authority in the West. Instead, Native Americans used the written word to challenge a massive colonial apparatus that disregarded their own opinions about their futures. My earlier work describes the widespread use of literacy among western Native Americans in the late nineteenth century (excluding the Five Tribes and other nations originating east of the Mississippi) and the intertribal networks of communication that endured despite attempts to confine them on reservations.Footnote 3 Building on that research, this article demonstrates how western Native Americans, many of whom, like Wolf Chief, had only recently acquired literacy, also amplified their voices by building networks of correspondence with white Americans. This article focuses on Wolf Chief’s correspondence, but it also relies on the histories held in more than 1,200 surviving letters written by other western Native Americans to non-Native individuals or organizations between 1876 and 1896.Footnote 4 These letters to non-Natives criticized U.S. government policies and employees, demanded that treaty promises be kept, and offered thoughts on Indian Affairs decisions. Natives also wrote to fight for land rights, reveal settler intrusions and other illegal actions, and to advocate for advantageous U.S. legislation. They exposed the arbitrary power of the U.S. government to limit their basic freedoms, writing to defend important parts of their cultures, such as religious beliefs, dancing, and social norms. This production of human knowledge represented in letters written by western Native Americans, the ideas and information that were communicated, has not received enough attention from scholars.

Historians who focus on the early reservation years rarely cast Native Americans as passive victims of U.S. power, but those years are still generally understood as a period when tribal nations in the West were at their weakest.Footnote 5 Scholars use this period to better understand the crushing weight of settler colonialism and U.S. government policies of dispossession, confinement, and assimilation.Footnote 6 Historians still describe a languishing existence on reservations, where Indigenous societies quickly declined. Scholarship has rightfully focused on the power that Native Americans lost during the late nineteenth century, yet scholars often overlook the power that they kept, and how they kept it. In those crucial years after the western Indian Wars, tribal nations survived detribalization and total dispossession, the ultimate goals of U.S. Indian policy.

We should consider the many acts of resistance among Native Americans themselves in those early reservation years, including activism and self-advocacy through correspondence.Footnote 7 Because Natives faced confinement on western reservations, segregated from American society, their correspondence with white Americans became a consequential weapon against U.S. colonialism. The so-called Progressive Indians of the early twentieth century were not the first western Native Americans to attempt resistance rooted in literacy.Footnote 8 Well before then, western Natives effectively utilized literacy to challenge the reservation system, counteract colonial abuses, and maintain a sense of self-determination. Indigenous life during the early reservation years was one of intellectual mobility and activism, and the diverse ideas and arguments that Native Americans used to defend their freedoms offer a new understanding of the ways Indigenous peoples resisted colonialism.Footnote 9

Wolf Chief’s “Letter Writing Habit”

To better understand how Indigenous letter writers in the West made a difference in their lives in the 1880s, this article explores Wolf Chief’s history.Footnote 10 A decade of his life serves as a case study. The many issues that Wolf Chief described in his letters, the demands he made, and the problems he exposed were commonly communicated by hundreds of other Native Americans who were writing similar letters in the same years, using similar strategies of persuasion. Historians have recognized a handful of prominent individuals from western tribes, like Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota), Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), Rosalie and Susette LaFlesche (Omaha), or Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), who relied on letters for self-advocacy in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 11 But there were many other less-prominent men and women, including Wolf Chief, who became strong advocates for their communities by using correspondence. There are too many to list here, but there were Southern Cheyennes like Spotted Horse and Richard Davis, Kiowas like Joshua Given and Laura Doanmoe, Omahas like George Miller and Mantcu-nanba, Pueblos like Henry Kendall and Annie Thomas, Lakota like John Grass, Maggie Stands Looking, and Chauncey Yellow Robe, and Yanktons like William Selwyn. Many tribes had advocates like these before the twentieth century and they all provided, in their letters, early first-person accounts of struggles against reservation life.

Wolf Chief used letters in a great variety of ways, reflecting the myriads of concerns of many others. While Wolf Chief’s form of activism was not unique, he is remarkable because of the number of his letters that survive, letters he sent to Washington, D.C., and elsewhere during his lifetime that were preserved and still remain in archives. At least 112 of his letters (or copies) written between 1880 and 1891 survive, with twenty-three more known that do not survive. He was among the most prolific Native letter writers of the nineteenth century, and perhaps the most persistent, especially among those who were not considered chiefs in their own communities. In 1901, a Fort Berthold agent explained to the commissioner of Indian Affairs that Wolf Chief had “contracted the letter writing habit and cannot be suppressed.”Footnote 12 Twenty years earlier, as the first Fort Berthold agent who had to deal with Wolf Chief’s letter-writing campaigns put it, Wolf Chief was “somewhat given to complaints.”Footnote 13 The agent described Wolf Chief as “a good ‘worker’” who had “made some progress in his studies,” and felt “greatly elated over his ability to write,” possessing “a degree of pardonable egotism in being able to write to the ‘Great Father.’”Footnote 14 But it was more than just ego; this ability led to practical results. Now Wolf Chief could represent his people.

In the 1880s, the people at Fort Berthold were adjusting to the ever-tightening administration of Indian Affairs rules and regulations, while dealing with the pressures of a settler invasion, the “Great Dakota Boom.”Footnote 15 Wolf Chief had numerous motivations for writing and employed diverse strategies of advocacy, and they changed over time as the people at Fort Berthold faced new challenges. It is difficult at times to interpret Wolf Chief’s true motivations and opinions beyond what he spelled out in English, a language he was learning on the go. He wrote to a white audience that misunderstood Native Americans, and he had to consider the best avenues for persuasion—which might include telling the audience what it wanted to hear. It is clear, however, that Wolf Chief hoped to compel the U.S. government both to fulfill its obligations to Hidatsas, Mandans, and Arikaras and to reduce its unilateral, colonial domination of day-to-day reservation life. He believed that good solutions to the crises on the reservation required the inclusion of Native viewpoints and opinions. To rebalance the power on the reservation, he frequently attacked the influence of Fort Berthold agents, telling higher authorities and influential allies outside government about the wrongs he believed agents had committed.

Wolf Chief also reminded non-Natives that his people endured and that they deserved control over their own affairs—he used letters to safeguard their autonomy, or sovereignty. When Wolf Chief wrote about issues on the reservation, like the incessant threat of hunger or the injustice of compulsory school attendance, he offered solutions he thought best for his people and his own family. Through strategic correspondence and advocacy, Wolf Chief and other Native leaders actively worked to protect their sovereignty and uphold their nations’ interests in dealings with the United States government.Footnote 16 Wolf Chief did not use the specific English word sovereignty, a more twentieth-century term, in his letters, or even the word nation. Instead, he used English phrases that stressed an autonomous, collective identity that warranted clout, such as “us,” “the people,” “we are the people,” or “we Mandans and Gros Ventres [Hidatsas],” which affirmed their status as an independent, distinct community of people who wished to remain that way.Footnote 17

Wolf Chief began writing letters to influential white people when he was not yet fluent in English and continued to do so until his death in 1933. Sometime in the late 1870s, Wolf Chief paid a white man to teach him how to speak, read, and write in English. In 1878 or 1879, he began attending the mission day school part-time. He was around twenty-eight years old, sitting amongst children.Footnote 18 The missionary who ran the school remembered decades later that Wolf Chief “showed force of character from the beginning and worked with untiring enthusiasm.”Footnote 19 In 1880, as Wolf Chief remembered later in life, he was asked by three prominent Hidatsas (leaders Crow’s Breast, Many Antelopes, and John Smith, who was the agency interpreter) if he could write a letter to Washington, D.C. Their homelands were reduced and converted to the Fort Berthold Reservation in 1870, and the men were not satisfied with the U.S. government’s policies since.Footnote 20 They wanted to visit with the U.S. president in-person, and as Wolf Chief began writing that request, the men wanted Wolf Chief to also include details about what was happening at Fort Berthold. They suggested, “We are hungry. Buffaloes gone. We want more rations.”Footnote 21 Eventually, Wolf Chief’s letter was answered. The men could come to Washington, but they had to pay their own way. It was not an entirely positive response, but Wolf Chief and others were impressed. (Figure 1) Many of Wolf Chief’s future letters would come to represent an effort by members of a sovereign tribal nation to maintain diplomatic relations with the United States, to remind them that they were a nation, that Hidatsas were friends with Americans—and at peace—and that the United States had obligations to keep just as the Hidatsas were keeping theirs.Footnote 22

Figure 1.

Wolf Chief mailed this picture of himself to President Chester A. Arthur in 1882. Photograph by Orlando S. Goff, 1878. Enclosed in Wolf Chief to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Oct. 23, 1882, Record Group 75, Letters Rec’d by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Letter 19728, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, D.C.

Soon after that first letter, Wolf Chief asked for things that he thought critical to his people in two letters sent to President Rutherford B. Hayes in January and February 1881.Footnote 23 For one, he wanted something done about the steamboats that had been stealing Hidatsa and Mandan cord wood along the Missouri River over the years—wood that was meant to be sold, already cut and stacked by Hidatsas and Mandans, including Wolf Chief.Footnote 24 This was an issue that he pursued through correspondence for years.Footnote 25 Guarding tribal lands and resources was a constant endeavor for Native Americans as reservations became islands in a sea of settler exploitation. The reservation system created thousands of miles of new borderlands on the continent, and many like Wolf Chief worked to keep non-Natives where they belonged. The U.S. government had an obligation to protect reservation boundaries. Natives sent letters to U.S. officials to report violations of settlers and their enterprises, like trespassers who illegally used Indian lands. Wolf Chief also wanted to prevent white settlers from grazing their cattle freely on the reservation, a common concern for other Native writers. At least two of Wolf Chief’s letters about settlers’ cattle led the commissioner of Indian Affairs to investigate by writing to the Fort Berthold agent.Footnote 26 (Figure 2)

Figure 2.

Destinations of Known Letters Sent by Wolf Chief from the Fort Berthold Reservation, 1881–1891. Boundaries circa 1884. Map by the author.

Wolf Chief did not just rely on letters to U.S. officials to initiate changes at Fort Berthold. He also wrote to any white person he thought might be effective, including settlers living in the region, establishing a broad audience who had an interest in the reservation experiment. He told a white acquaintance that the well-known owner of the steamboat General Terry stole four cords of wood from him.Footnote 27 He wrote a similar letter to a Bismarck, Dakota Territory, businessman named I. P. Baker in November 1880, and the letter was published in the Bismarck Tribune under the patronizing headline “He Write Good.”Footnote 28 A few months later, Wolf Chief wrote directly to the publisher of the Bismarck Tribune, Clement A. Lounsberry. This time, he wrote to tell the steamboat men that he would be charging $5 for a cord of ash wood, rather than the $4.50 they had paid him the previous summer. He continued writing to the Bismarck Tribune, especially to advertise his wood, but he had to keep publicizing the violations of white settlers. For instance, he wrote to the newspaper and others to report that settlers were stealing Hidatsa horses.Footnote 29 Wolf Chief’s letters to newspapers appealed to the self-interest of settlers in Bismarck, Washburn, and throughout Dakota Territory who had a financial interest in a well-functioning Fort Berthold, whether it was steamboaters, real estate speculators, ranchers, or suppliers to the reservation. Wolf Chief also wrote on other topics to publishers far outside his region. In 1884, for instance, Wolf Chief wrote a letter to an editor at the prominent weekly New York magazine, The Independent, that appealed to the empathy and compassion of the white audience, knowing that it was read by progressives who could influence national discourse.Footnote 30

No matter the audience, Wolf Chief’s concerns were exhaustive. His letters were more than personal grievances; they echoed his belief that the Three Tribes should actively influence the administration of the reservation. He wrote to U.S. officials because he wanted Indians to be the ones who were paid to cut hay, not the white employees.Footnote 31 He wanted his people, not the U.S. government, to keep the cow hides that remained after the issue of beef rations; he also asked the president for a wagon, and he got one.Footnote 32 Wolf Chief also told President Rutherford B. Hayes that the Three Tribes needed guns and cartridges that would help defend them from the horse raiding from some Lakota at Standing Rock and from those Wolf Chief called “Chippewas” (probably from Turtle Mountain).Footnote 33 Those requests were always denied—the U.S. government did not want Indians to have modern, quick-loading ammunition—but Wolf Chief kept pushing back against the colonial directive until at least 1884, as horse theft continued.Footnote 34 Naturally, western Natives wrote to voice their opinions on U.S. policies and legislation, in opposition or support, or simply to figure out what U.S. policy makers had in mind for their people.Footnote 35 Land rights were also a common topic in letters from Wolf Chief and other reservations. People held tight to their tribal lands, and they wrote to learn about the U.S. and state governments’ strategies to chip away at them, including fraud and the intentional disregard of agreements.Footnote 36

Attacking Agency Authority

Wolf Chief’s letter output took off in 1882—more than thirty letters from that year survive—and it appears that he made significant efforts to improve his writing.Footnote 37 Wolf Chief quickly learned that he could openly criticize the U.S. Indian agents at Fort Berthold in his correspondence, perhaps weakening their hold on him and his people, and he became a significant challenge for reservation officials. Agents reigned over western reservations, far from the oversight of the commissioner in Washington, D.C. Because they understood the bearing white reservation administrators could have on their lives, many Native Americans offered their opinions on agency decisions, like the hiring and firing of agents, interpreters, farmers, and teachers, or the licensing of traders. Wolf Chief once told the commissioner that “doing justice to Indians is found in choosing [good] imployees” and he wanted his people to have some say in those decisions.Footnote 38

Native letter writers recognized that their autonomy as nations was being diminished by U.S. federal and state laws, executive orders, policies, and rules that were put in place without the consent of the tribal nations affected. Wolf Chief complained in multiple letters that agents refused to tell him anything about what the U.S. government planned at Fort Berthold.Footnote 39 He complained that Indian Affairs was flawed because decisions were made without consulting the Three Tribes. “We, the Indians of this reservation complain that we never had a good agent for this reserve,” he wrote to the commissioner, “and whose fault is it? Certainly it is not our fault and whose it then?”Footnote 40

Wolf Chief did not trust any of the four agents who directed Fort Berthold in the 1880s, and like others in the West, he used letters to obstruct their abuse. As one historian of Fort Berthold put it, Wolf Chief’s complaints would eventually make agents “tremble in their boots.”Footnote 41 Wolf Chief told the U.S. president, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and others that Agent Jacob Kauffman was stealing Indian annuities and that he was a liar. He even wrote to the governor of Dakota Territory to tell him that the new agent who arrived at the reservation in 1884, Abram Gifford, spoke “very bad at Indians,” and did not have time for them.Footnote 42 Wolf Chief wanted his agent removed, a frequent demand from letter writers on other reservations. But letter writers were worried about retribution from their agents for mailing out complaints, including Wolf Chief. In multiple letters, Wolf Chief told President Chester A. Arthur and the commissioner of Indian Affairs that Agent Kauffman said he was “bad” because he wrote his letters. Kauffman told him to stop writing letters and removed him from the Indian police; his uniform was taken (which was his best set of clothes, he said); and he was still owed five dollars in pay.Footnote 43 “The agent does not like me,” Wolf Chief told the former agency clerk William Courtenay in late 1882 and again in early 1883.Footnote 44 His feelings were not hurt; he was legitimately worried about his safety. “I am afraid,” he wrote in letters to the commissioner and to Arthur, perhaps fearing violent repercussions from Kauffman.Footnote 45

There are several documented instances of agents surveilling and censoring the mail coming in and going out of their reservations. While there is not yet direct evidence that Fort Berthold agents tampered with or seized mail, Agent Kauffman used other methods to suppress correspondence that was critical of him. Besides intimidating and punishing Wolf Chief, Kauffman fired agency clerk William Courtenay after accusing him of writing letters on behalf of Indians that contained “complaints against” Kauffman. Courtenay denied writing “any letter for any Indian,” but Kauffman’s drastic action demonstrates the length he went to minimize the activism of the people over which he ruled.Footnote 46 It also demonstrates his frustration with Wolf Chief, who was fired from the police around the same time.

One of the tasks of agents was to encourage, and eventually coerce, parents to send their children to school. By the 1890s, school attendance was becoming mandatory on most reservations. And each year, agents had to tally the literate Indians on their reservations and report it to the commissioner. Annual reports from all reservations were compiled and printed for the public to see. Growth in literacy, among other indicators of supposed civilizing, demonstrated the effectiveness of an agent. But as literacy rates increased, agents became more and more exposed. Letters authored by Native Americans became an effective check on agent power. Native Americans criticized agents for many reasons under many circumstances in letters, from complaints about corruption to grievances about the unfairness or cruelty of an agent. Letters also questioned the morality of agents, reservation employees, Indian policemen, and even missionaries.

Agents found themselves advancing literacy on one hand while they tried to quash the products of that literacy with the other. In 1891, it became clear to a special agent visiting the Siletz Reservation in western Oregon that the Siletz agent was punishing anyone who publicized his misdeeds. “These Indians (many) are capable of writing to the Government themselves,” he reported to Senator Henry Dawes, “but the few that have attempted it have been deterred to doing so again from the fact a copy of their letters are sent to the Agent who sends a policeman after the writer.” Even if an author was “fortunate” to escape “punishment,” they were still “ever afterward under the displeasure of the Agent for writing to the Department.”Footnote 47 Likewise, Susette La Flesche (Inshata-Theumba) told a large crowd of white Bostonians in 1887 that if an Omaha “sent a letter to the government, it was sent back to the agent and he was told to see to it; and the Indian who sent the letter soon felt the agent’s displeasure, if it was a letter of complaint.”Footnote 48 The special agent at Siletz suggested that the commissioner should protect the names of those writers, who were afraid of the “many cruelties” that were “practiced” by agents “unknown to the Commissioner.”Footnote 49 Those cruelties were a very real threat to any author who challenged the reservation system by scrutinizing U.S. officials.

Wolf Chief faced those threats head-on and did not hide from the Fort Berthold agents. In fact, Wolf Chief made himself known to white settlers in Dakota Territory, perhaps in part to protect himself from agents. In June 1883, Wolf Chief, with several co-signers, courageously wrote to the readers of the Bismarck Tribune to tell them “the news in this agency.” “We have agent here but he do not help us,” he wrote, “He helps his folks – that’s all help we get from him … He is trying to make people live half sick hungry … J. Kauffman tells us this but it is we are poor but we do not steal potatoes and oats. He told us Chiefs we steal we are Bad people. We do not.”Footnote 50 They were bold, and very public, accusations meant to hold the agent accountable.

Ensuring Sustenance, Ending a Monopoly, and Establishing His Own Trader Store

Wolf Chief’s most consistent topic in his correspondence in the 1880s and into the 1890s was the lack of necessities and constant hunger at Fort Berthold. His efforts demonstrated a commitment not only to address immediate problems but also to advocate for the participation of Hidatsas, Mandans, and Arikaras in decision-making processes. He proactively warned U.S. officials of bad weather and farming conditions, and he hoped they would heed his warnings of poor harvests in the future. “You know well that we are very short of crop this year,” he wrote, frustrated with the lack of planning.Footnote 51 Time and again, he pleaded for more rations and supplies as his predictions were sadly realized. The harsh winters of 1884–1885, 1888–1889, and 1890–1891, in particular, brought desperate conditions.Footnote 52 “My children cried yesterday, my heart bad,” Wolf Chief wrote to new president Grover Cleveland in March 1885, “the flour they give us is eaten up in two days – so we cannot do anything, lift a plow – because we are so weak.”Footnote 53

These conditions meant that it was crucial for the Three Tribes to have some control over how they acquired food and supplies. In fact, Wolf Chief’s greatest notoriety among white folks came from his campaign to reduce the high price of goods sold at the Fort Berthold trader stores. He pursued this campaign for much of the 1880s. Indian Affairs assigned trader licenses to white men, which gave them the authority to set up shop on a reservation, usually with a monopoly. The commissioner of Indian Affairs did little to keep these “Indian traders” from charging exorbitant rates.Footnote 54 Most Native Americans on western reservations lived with the constant threat of starvation because of a variety of U.S. government policies that fostered price gouging. Trader goods supplemented the small annuities promised by treaties. Food was on the traders’ shelves and often nowhere else. Natives were not allowed to leave their reservations without permission from the Indian Office, so they could not always shop off-reservation or hunt. “We want go out hunt buffalos in 60 miles from Ft. Berthold which so nere,” Wolf Chief told the Bismarck Tribune; “we want go out so bad get some to eat,” but the agent would not let them.Footnote 55

Wolf Chief undoubtedly felt an obligation to provide sustenance for his people. Late in his life, Wolf Chief recalled his role in a profoundly important Hidatsa ceremony that took place in 1870, and which was meant to bring buffalo to the people. The performer of the rites, Poor Wolf, who “represented” the “Sun,” sang songs to Wolf Chief: “Wolf Chief brings the buffaloes; Wolf Chief will call the rain; Wolf Chief will bring the fruits and plants; the people will have plenty to eat.” Poor Wolf promised these things, that “the village would be saved” because of Wolf Chief, which must have rooted in him a deep sense of responsibility.Footnote 56

Wolf Chief took it upon himself to end the monopoly enjoyed by the trader at Fort Berthold, which, he believed, would lower prices on the reservation. In letters to various men, including U.S. presidents, Wolf Chief charged that the sole reservation store operator, W. B. Shaw, was a cheat and a liar. He told President Arthur that he could get eight pounds of sugar from the steamboats for one dollar, but that same dollar only got him one pound at the trader’s store. “My agent and the trader love each other, they are great friends,” Wolf Chief told Arthur, suggesting that agency corruption played a role in the exorbitant prices.Footnote 57 Wolf Chief’s initial solution was to create competition by licensing new, trustworthy traders. He wanted William Courtenay, the former clerk, to start his own store at Fort Berthold that offered fair prices.Footnote 58 Wolf Chief offered to run the store for Courtenay, but Courtenay had no interest. The Bismarck Tribune reported in April 1882 that Wolf Chief was trying to “revolutionize old customs at his agency,” by “flooding the country with appeals to merchants to come there and establish commercial houses.” The newspaper printed a letter that Wolf Chief sent to J. B. Marshall Shoes and Boots in Bismarck. “We all want two stores,” he wrote, “come up here.”Footnote 59 He sent another solicitation to Sig Hanauer, who owned a clothing store, telling him that there was “much money” for a second store at Fort Berthold, “we all want good buy.”Footnote 60 The Grand Forks Herald in Dakota Territory called it an “Anti-Monopoly” effort.Footnote 61 (Figure 3)

Figure 3.

Fort Berthold Trader’s Store, ca. 1880. Photograph by F. Jay Haynes. Wolf Chief identified himself as the man in the white hat in a letter to President Arthur. See Wolf Chief to Pres. Arthur, Jan. 14, 1882, Record Group 75, Letters Rec’d by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Letter 1563, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, D.C.

Wolf Chief was determined that spring to prove that the reservation trader was cheating his customers. In a search for price data, he wrote to at least two different wholesalers in Bismarck, asking them how much their goods cost; he also asked Hanauer. One wholesaler offered to sell Wolf Chief nine pounds of sugar for one dollar, while also providing better prices for coffee, tea, bacon, and flour. With that information in hand, Wolf Chief wrote to the Southern Workman, a newspaper published monthly at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, nearly 2,000 miles from Fort Berthold, to let its readers know that the Fort Berthold trader was a “bad man” who robbed Indians. He sent the newspaper, which had a national readership among the so-called Friends of the Indian, more than just a convincing argument. He forwarded the letters he received from the wholesalers as proof.Footnote 62 This is another example of Wolf Chief using the power of publicity, writing to newspapers, a strategy other Natives used across the West.Footnote 63

Indeed, Wolf Chief’s efforts caught the attention of the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who asked Agent Kauffman for solutions to the high store prices.Footnote 64 By October 1882, Wolf Chief reported that W. B. Shaw was selling five pounds of sugar for one dollar, an improvement. But flour was still one dollar per fourteen pounds, much higher than in Bismarck. When it became clear that Shaw would be allowed to keep his store going, Wolf Chief twice asked for a second store and convinced an Indian inspector that it was a good idea.Footnote 65 A second store would also make Wolf Chief’s thirty-mile journey across the Missouri River to Shaw’s store unnecessary. Wolf Chief even began observing the store’s shipments that were unloaded off the steamboats—he recorded the counts of sacks of goods and sent them to the U.S. president—and he learned that the steamboats were only charging Shaw a half cent per pound for freight.

In December 1882, Fort Berthold agent Kauffman admitted to the commissioner of Indian Affairs that people were complaining about the trader, including a delegation of chiefs and headmen who protested “against the manner in which they” were “treated by the trader.”Footnote 66 Kauffman asked that Shaw’s trader’s license not be renewed, yet Shaw remained a trader through 1884. Wolf Chief’s campaign continued into 1885, with many letters to businessmen, the U.S. president, and the commissioner of Indian Affairs.Footnote 67 In early 1886, the commissioner, now frustrated with Wolf Chief’s “complaining” letters, particularly one sent to the Dakota Territory governor, told the new Fort Berthold agent, Abram Gifford, that Wolf Chief should send any further communications to him only through his agent.Footnote 68 But Wolf Chief did not listen. He sent at least five more letters directly to the commissioner and the president that year.

After years of dealing with white traders and the long trip to the nearest store, Wolf Chief, sometime in 1889, decided to operate his own store. A new white trader had come, but that new trader was allowed to open his store “right in the government storehouse,” which annoyed Wolf Chief.Footnote 69 He reported his latest agent, Major John Murphy, for the offense, even drawing a layout of the government building with the trader store inside, leading to an investigation and Murphy’s temporary suspension.Footnote 70 But before Wolf Chief made his report, he started trading at his own house, at his expense, and he did not ask permission to do it. He set up shop and traded for his people. Wolf Chief announced his venture to the new commissioner of Indian Affairs in February 1890. “You wanted me to be like whiteman,” he wrote the commissioner, “and I want you to help me to be such.”Footnote 71

Soon enough, according to Wolf Chief, Agent Murphy “bothered” Wolf Chief “in every way to keep” him “from keeping a store,” even though Murphy told the commissioner that he welcomed Wolf Chief’s store.Footnote 72 Murphy advised Wolf Chief that he had to follow U.S. laws, including not selling metallic cartridges (modern ammunition) to Indians. Wolf Chief asked the commissioner to send him the “reservation laws,” while also asking for the agent to be fired.Footnote 73 Initially, the commissioner told Wolf Chief that he needed a trader’s license to trade with Indians on a reservation. The irony of such a decision was not lost on Wolf Chief.

“Please consider the matter not in the interest of any white-men, but in the interest of the Indians of this reservation,” Wolf Chief told the commissioner.Footnote 74 Eventually, Wolf Chief was allowed to operate his store under conditions determined by Indian Affairs.Footnote 75 He also convinced the agent and the commissioner to give him use of an old store building. (Wolf Chief wanted to buy it, but the commissioner believed he could only legally rent it, for five dollars per year.)Footnote 76 In fact, Wolf Chief so thoroughly convinced the commissioner that the commissioner became worried that a potential third trader store, located twenty-five miles north of the agency, would “unjustly interfere with Wolf Chief’s business.”Footnote 77 Wolf Chief was a “shrewd man of business,” according to an editor at the Bismarck Tribune, “bright and intelligent,” and was “looked up to as a counsellor and adviser for his tribe.”Footnote 78 Wolf Chief operated his store for years to come, offering the people a Native-controlled alternative.Footnote 79

“His Baneful Influence” on Education

Practicing well-considered diplomacy, Wolf Chief frequently claimed to agree with the “white man’s ways” in letters to U.S. officials to garner attention and support from those who could benefit his people. But many white people struggled to empathize with Wolf Chief, thus creating obstacles for him. It was particularly hard for some to reckon how a seemingly “progressive Indian,” one who could read and write—and who claimed to respect the “white man’s ways”—was regularly opposed to the U.S. government’s objectives. Of course, Wolf Chief received criticism because he was not a staunch proponent of assimilation. He was not a progressive; he would have been thoroughly content to be left alone by whites in the 1880s. The progressive-traditionalist dichotomy thrust onto Native Americans by nineteenth-century whites did not capture the complexities of Indigenous life and the circumstances they had to navigate.Footnote 80

Wolf Chief clearly recognized some benefits of Americanized education, for instance, but he still criticized schools, especially if parents were coerced to send their children to them. In 1884, he seemed to complain to the Secretary of the Interior that the agent was forcing boys to go to the Fort Stevenson Industrial School, a boarding school just east of the reservation.Footnote 81 Again, Wolf Chief wanted to protect his people’s autonomy. Also, many Native Americans, especially parents like Wolf Chief, used letters to maintain pressure on educators who were responsible for the welfare of their children. Parents wrote to off-reservation schools and to those who had authority over them to demand better treatment for children, to demand the return of their children, and to report a variety of abuses committed by educators. School children also wrote to authorities and allies to right wrongs and circumvent the authority of school superintendents and teachers. Wolf Chief’s criticism of the Fort Stevenson School may have begun in 1884 when he wrote to a newspaper that the children at the school were going hungry.Footnote 82 He did, however, confirm that Hidatsas agreed to send thirty-five boys to the school.Footnote 83

From the perspective of the superintendent at the Fort Stevenson school, Wolf Chief, the man who attended school to become literate, was a resister of the white man’s ways. In 1886, the superintendent accused Wolf Chief of “persistently” fighting “the interests of the school.” He claimed that Wolf Chief had “a strong influence over the members of the tribe … he urges his followers to oppose the agent and resist the encroachment of the white man’s ways.” “He ought to be transferred to some place where he will not exert his baneful influence,” he concluded.Footnote 84 Moreover, the superintendent claimed that Wolf Chief was influential, but just a year earlier, Fort Berthold’s agent Abram Gifford told the commissioner of Indian Affairs that Wolf Chief was “devoid of influence” and only wrote letters so that he could become a chief.Footnote 85 Gifford, of course, hoped to diminish the power of Wolf Chief’s criticisms in the eyes of the commissioner. U.S. officials were afraid of the impact of Native Americans’ communications on their assimilation efforts, or their impact on their government careers, and they tried to suppress them.

By 1885, Wolf Chief was a thorn in the side of Gifford and a real threat to his career. Wolf Chief made himself known not just to white people in Washington, D.C., but also to white people of importance in Dakota Territory. Readers of the Bismarck Tribune were still familiar with his correspondence. And in February 1885, Wolf Chief was given the privileges of the floor during a session of the Dakota Territorial Legislature.Footnote 86 He had built a reputation, which carried the concerns of the Three Tribes beyond the reservation. That reputation annoyed Fort Berthold agents. “There is no tribe or band of Indians on this reservation who have given me in the administering of the affairs of this agency as much trouble as ‘Wolf Chief,’” Agent Gifford told the commissioner, “whose character is that of a troublesome, meddlesome, and dissatisfied Indian.”Footnote 87

Finally, in late 1886, Gifford admitted to the commissioner that Wolf Chief had influence “over a certain class of Indians” who “oppose everything.” But, the agent also reported that after an Inspector Dixon had “plain talk” with Wolf Chief about his issues, Wolf Chief stopped resisting the enrollment of Hidatsa children at Fort Stevenson (among other “very good” effects).Footnote 88 Less than three years later, however, Wolf Chief asked the commissioner what right the agent had to send Hidatsas to Fort Stevenson school against the will of the parents. Not only was it a boarding school that was a great distance from the Hidatsa settlement, but, according to Wolf Chief, the school buildings were unsafe: “too old and about to fall down pretty soon.”Footnote 89

Wolf Chief proposed that a new day school, not a boarding school, be built in the middle of their village, and he continued to send letters to get it done.Footnote 90 After the commissioner nixed the idea, Wolf Chief argued that adults needed schooling too, but they could not attend a boarding school. A nearby day school would give adults an opportunity. “They need to be educated some way,” he wrote; “you educate our young ones please also give us the old ones some education that we may keep our children from rascality.”Footnote 91 The commissioner seemed to be convinced by Wolf Chief’s argument and promised to consider construction in the months to come.Footnote 92 Wolf Chief got the ball rolling, so to speak. The new day school was eventually built in 1894, where children would return home to their families at the end of each school day.Footnote 93

Resisting the unilateral objectives of reservation agents, Wolf Chief successfully manipulated the strategies of the Indian Office. He was even able to maintain an influence on the operations of the school. Wolf Chief and his nephew, Edward Goodbird, were named to the school’s three-man “Board of Visitors,” who visited and inspected the school twice a month so that they were “fully informed of the manner in which” the children were “taught … and … treated.”Footnote 94

Stopping Agent Murphy

Wolf Chief’s advocacy generated change at Fort Berthold. That change was not initiated by reformist-minded white missionaries, white “Indian rights” advocates, or the “Friends of the Indians” back east. As colonized people living under the power of a supposedly democratic nation-state, Native Americans took on the burden of telling U.S. citizens how their government managed its reservations. In some circumstances, Native-authored letters were the only instrument toward justice on a reservation. Native Americans used letters to report horrible crimes, for example, that U.S. authorities on the reservation would likely bury. In late 1889, Wolf Chief and George Bassett, who was educated at the Santee Mission School in Nebraska, wrote on behalf of a Hidatsa woman to charge the Fort Berthold agent with sexual assault. The statements of the woman, two witnesses, and the woman’s husband were contained in the letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs. The woman claimed that Agent John Murphy assaulted her while she was asking for nails at the agency office. Murphy told the woman to go into a back room with him, but she ran out of the building.Footnote 95 Murphy threatened the witnesses and the victim’s husband not to report the assault. This is one of several letters found from Native Americans living on reservations who used letters to report sex crimes to Washington because they knew that their accusations would not be considered on the reservation.

Wolf Chief’s letter led to an investigation and Murphy’s suspension, but the U.S. president allowed him to resume his duties in April 1890 for reasons unclear.Footnote 96 A second round of complaints from Wolf Chief, however, detailed in part in the trader store affair above, led to Murphy’s second suspension. In May 1890, Wolf Chief told the commissioner that “most Indians did not like” Murphy and “all white men employees find fault against” him. “I do not like the Agent to stay here,” he wrote. “If the Department goes into the bottom of the matter I am sure the Agent no longer be kept here.”Footnote 97 Unfortunately, Murphy was reinstated once again in June 1890 after he traveled to Washington, D.C., to appeal in person. Nevertheless, investigators continued to press Agent Murphy on a variety of accusations, eventually with the encouragement of Henry Clay Hansborough, North Dakota’s first member of the U.S. House of Representatives and its recently elected U.S. senator.Footnote 98

Wolf Chief’s September 1890 letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs revived the attack on Murphy, which claimed that only half the rations at Fort Berthold were distributed, and that cattlemen’s stock roamed the reservation, suggesting that Murphy had made a deal with them to graze on reservation land.Footnote 99 The commissioner demanded an explanation from Murphy. Then, by early 1891, another witness testified, according to an ally of Murphy, that Murphy had intercourse with an Indian woman. Murphy was also accused of stealing from the Indians’ supplies to sell them in the trader store, selling the agency’s cattle and farming implements to settlers, and using “incessantly indecent language of the vilest kind before the Indians, calling them the vilest of names without care.”Footnote 100 It seems those accusations, which persisted into 1892, came from both white agency employees and Natives, while Murphy claimed from the beginning that the attacks were motivated by politics and his Catholicism.Footnote 101 In 1893, Murphy was discharged from the U.S. Army, likely because of the accusations, which gave the Indian Office the opportunity to replace Murphy.Footnote 102 By that point, though, Murphy had become a wealthy cattleman in partnership with his brother. After he became a state representative, North Dakotans wondered how an Indian agent on a modest government salary accumulated such wealth.Footnote 103

Conclusion

Still, Agent Murphy was gone. Wolf Chief’s letters mentioned here, and the hundreds of others written by people living under intense colonial control, did have “an effect upon the Department,” as Murphy described it.Footnote 104 They rarely made the impact that the authors of these letters hoped, and letters were not the only avenue of Native perseverance, but one must consider the impact of this vast collection of intellectual activity—all of the information, protests, and demands—on the history of the reservation era. Some might see Wolf Chief’s expression of power as limited, considering the circumstances his people faced. But without Wolf Chief’s challenge of colonial authority, Agent Murphy would have continued to harm the people at Fort Berthold. It is likely that Wolf Chief’s letters to the commissioner and others, especially those published in the Bismarck Tribune, made Fort Berthold agents reconsider the ways they administered the reservation. While arguing for the reduction of colonial control over reservation life, he also demanded that the U.S. government honor its commitments to the Hidatsas, Mandans, and Arikaras by providing annuities and preventing settler trespass, ensuring the well-being of his community.

Wolf Chief’s advocacy was rooted in the conviction that the Three Tribes deserved a meaningful role in shaping their own futures and protecting their autonomy. His wide-ranging correspondence emphasized the importance of including Native perspectives in the management of reservation affairs, as he believed that effective solutions required the active involvement of his people. Despite the effort to confine Natives on reservations, Wolf Chief used letters to broadcast strategically his ideas to those off the reservation, relying on diverse correspondents in settler society: U.S. officials, assimilationist Friends of the Indian, settler capitalists, railroad operators, and newspaper editors who may have been looking to publish a scandal.

Wolf Chief’s efforts were not isolated incidents; rather, they were part of a broader pattern of Indigenous activism through correspondence during the early reservation years. On reservations, Natives faced colonial control from the very beginning with determined strategies of resistance and hundreds of people, compounded over decades, wrote letters to make some difference in their lives. Following their military conquest, the U.S. government presumed that Indian policies could be implemented unilaterally without much dissent. Many in Indian Affairs believed that their system would change Native Americans and erode their nations entirely. But, because of persistent Native American activism, the ultimate goals of the United States were unsuccessful. Literacy, something meant to ease assimilation and detribalization, contributed to activism. Even with Wolf Chief’s reputation as a prolific letter writer, the school superintendent described him as someone who continued to “resist the encroachment of the white man’s ways.”Footnote 105 However, Wolf Chief’s actions demonstrate that, much like many other western Natives, he chose to engage with English-language correspondence not as an act of assimilation but as a means to assert the needs and perspectives of his people.

Wolf Chief’s history stretches much further than this article can take it. His life (1849–1933) deserves a thorough biography. Along with Hidatsa and Mandan friends and relatives, he moved forty miles west of the agency in 1885, across the Missouri River, where he ran his store, raised cattle, horses, pigs, and chickens, and grew grain, corn, and potatoes.Footnote 106 These people built a new community farther from the U.S. government’s watchful eye. Agents referred to the people there as “Wolf Chief’s Band” and the place as “Wolf Chief’s” settlement, but it became known as Independence.Footnote 107 “They wanted to be independent,” Rev. C. L. Hall remembered, “so considering the character of the people … we called the place Independence.”Footnote 108 Hidatsas and Mandans called it Awatahesh, “the hill by itself,” or the “lone hill,” a place Wolf Chief saw in a vision years before his people moved there.Footnote 109

In 1901, in a letter published in the Bismarck Daily Tribune, Wolf Chief told the editor that ever since he went to school when he was twenty-eight years old, he had continued to think about “which way” he would “pursue”: the “old fashion way or the white man’s way.” “After thinking it over,” he wrote, “my mind is toward the new way.”Footnote 110 He began attending Congregationalist meetings, became a “strong Christian” around 1906, according to his nephew Edward Goodbird, and eventually became a deacon at a church built in Independence on land Wolf Chief tried to donate.Footnote 111 The commissioner of Indian Affairs would not let Wolf Chief give away his land, so he sold the ten acres to the congregation for one dollar, “outwitting the commissioner after all,” Goodbird recalled. Wolf Chief still used correspondence to advocate for himself and his people into the next century. In letters to newspapers and the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Wolf Chief wrote to prevent white cattlemen from grazing on the reservation, to ensure an investigation on land claims, and to collect debts owed to the Three Tribes.Footnote 112 In 1910, underscoring his reputation as a respected correspondent, the Bismarck Daily Tribune reported that Wolf Chief, their “good friend of thirty years’ standing,” had sent in his usual subscription renewal request. “My dear and good friend,” Wolf Chief wrote to the editor, “I have not forgotten you.”Footnote 113 Wolf Chief had an enduring engagement with that press, and he valued the networks of communication he built with those beyond the reservation well into the twentieth century.

References

Notes

1 Murphy to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter cited as CIA), Nov. 16, 1891, Record Group 75.4, Letters Received by Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter cited as LRCIA), 5545, Records Bureau of Indian Affair, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as NARA-DC); Carolyn Gilman and Mary Jane Schneider, The Way to Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840–1920 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987), 227. Murphy here uses a phrase from Othello (“passing strange”) and references a couplet from Alexander Pope’s 1734 poem “An Essay on Man”: “Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.” In the 1800s, it was common for white Americans to refer to Native Americans as a “Poor Lo.”

2 “Another Letter from Wolf Chief,” Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, May 5, 1882.

3 Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

4 The author has catalogued more than 3,000 letters sent between 1871 and 1899 by western Natives from more than seventy-five tribal nations to both Native and non-Native recipients, a number that includes the many letters that have not survived. More than 2,500 of those are from 1880 to 1891.

5 Kathleen DuVal recently labeled this period “The Nadir,” for instance, while Manisha Sinha has described it as a “graveyard” of Indigenous “sovereignty.” Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (New York: Random House, 2024), 445; Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 (New York: Liveright, 2024), 308.

6 The “early reservation years,” roughly defined, began, depending on the western tribe, in the 1850s–1870s, and concluded at the turn of the century, although Indian Affairs policies that regulated reservation life did not change much until the 1930s. Most western Native Americans were forced onto reservations in the 1870s. The consolidated western reservation system, and its policies and purposes, took shape in the late 1860s, with the Peace Commission and the Medicine Lodge treaties, and further solidified in the 1880s. “The early reservation era” (or “years”) is a common term. Historians who focus on individual tribes often describe the first thirty or so years of a tribe’s history on a reservation as “the early reservation years.”

7 Scholars have amplified the role of white allies in the activism of the late nineteenth century. One reason is that the papers of the “Indian rights activists,” people like Helen Hunt Jackson, Thomas and Cora Bland, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Weldon, and others, are much more visible in the archives than Indigenous-authored sources. This does not include the volumes covering the more assimilationist-minded “Friends of the Indians,” like Herbert Welsh, Henry Dawes, Richard Henry Pratt, Alice Fletcher, and many others. See Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971); Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982); Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Thomas W. Cowger, “Dr. Thomas A. Bland, Critic of Forced Assimilation,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 4 (1992): 77–97; William T. Hagan, The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882–1904 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

8 Besides the supposed outliers like Sarah Winnemucca, historians have understood the beginnings of modern activism among western Native Americans—the organized activism that involved using the written word to make one’s case to white America—as rising in the early twentieth century, the time of the Society of American Indians and those Progressive Era Indians led by the brilliant Zitkála-Šá, Sherman Coolidge, Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, and other prominent individuals. See Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 232–233; Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Frederick E. Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indians and the Place They Made (New York: Penguin, 2012); Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 365–408.

9 For other work on Indigenous literacy as an anticolonial tool in the West, see Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed. Among the earlier eastern tribal nations, see Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); James W. Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820–1906 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1660–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For comparisons outside North America, see Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

10 For works with details on Wolf Chief’s life, see George Pepper and Gilbert L. Wilson, “An Hidatsa Shrine and the Beliefs Respecting It,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 2, part 4 (Dec. 1908); Edward Goodbird, Goodbird the Indian, His Story, Told by Himself to Gilbert L. Wilson (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914); Gilbert L. Wilson, “Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation,” The University of Minnesota Studies in the Social Sciences 9 (Nov. 1917); Robert H. Lowie, “Notes on the Social Organization and Customs of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow Indians,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 21, part 1 (1917); Alfred W. Bowers, “Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 194 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965); G. Hubert Smith, “Like-a-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold Garrison Reservoir North Dakota,” Anthropological Papers 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1972); Gilman and Schneider, The Way to Independence; Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed, 48, 197–198; Jane Elizabeth Kinney, “’The Heart of the Nation:’ The Roles of Female Leadership Networks in Mandan and Hidatsa Resistance and Resilience” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2024).

11 Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891, ed. Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Sally Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Bright Eyes: The Story of Susette LaFlesche, An Omaha Indian (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974); Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). See also Margot Liberty, ed., American Indian Intellectuals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

12 Richards to CIA, Feb. 6, 1901, RG 75.19.31, Letters to CIA, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (hereafter cited as RBIA), National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City, Missouri (hereafter cited as NARA-KC). The Fort Berthold Agency records are sparse before approximately 1888. Most of the agency correspondence before 1886 is found only in the preserved letters received by the commissioner of Indian Affairs (RG 75. 4, National Archives, Washington DC). Records collected at the agency itself are better preserved beginning in 1888 (but still incomplete), and incoming and outgoing correspondence from that year onward survives at the regional National Archives in Kansas City (Record Group 75.19.31). Records were destroyed by a fire at the agency on March 14, 1890. See Murphy to CIA, July 24, 1891, RG. 75.19.31, Sent, RBIA, NARA-KC.

13 Kauffman to CIA, Mar. 24, 1881, RG 75.4, LRCIA, 5545, RBIA, NARA-DC.

14 Kauffman to CIA, Mar. 24, 1881. The part-time student Wolf Chief was employed as Indian police in 1881 while also cutting wood and hay. He sold the agency twenty tons of hay that he had cut with a scythe. He complained to President James A. Garfield, who died before the letter was received, that he was not paid enough; he even sent the president the pay slip.

15 Roy W. Meyer, The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 127, 132–158; Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 183–99; Robert P. Wilkins and Wynona H. Wilkins, North Dakota: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 52–65, 80–87.

16 Leaders on most reservations came to rely on literate members of their communities for correspondence with Washington officials and others. Chiefs like Crow’s Breast depended on Wolf Chief’s skills. Leaders needed tribal members whom they could trust, and Indian agents or missionaries could not always be trusted to accurately and honestly convey a message. See Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Mar. 4, 1882, LRCIA, 4980; Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Apr. 3, 1882, LRCIA, 6745.

17 In his letters, Wolf Chief identifies himself as a Gros Ventres, not a Hidatsa, because that is what most white Americans, including the U.S. government mistakenly called them. The Gros Ventre people (A’aninin) are at the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana.

18 Wolf Chief to Marshall Jewell, Jan. 1901, Bismarck Daily Tribune, Jan. 23, 1901; Gilbert Wilson Notebook, Gilbert Wilson Papers (hereafter cited as GWP), vol. 35, 47–73, Minnesota Historical Society (hereafter cited as MHS), quoted in Gilman and Schneider, The Way to Independence, 152–154.

19 C. L. Hall, “Henry Wolf Chief,” The American Missionary 18, no. 7 (1926).

20 For an overview of late-nineteenth-century Fort Berthold, see Meyer, Village Indians, 100–158.

21 Wilson Notebook, GWP, vol. 35, quoted in Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 226–227.

22 As presidential administrations changed, Wolf Chief was sure to write the new presidents and Interior secretaries. (“I would like to shake hands with the new Great Father.”) He frequently asked if he and others could represent his people on a visit to Washington and speak face-to-face with the president. See Wolf Chief to CIA, Dec. 29, 1888, LRCIA, 368.

23 It seems President Hayes and later Garfield’s secretary had asked the Commissioner what Wolf Chief was trying to explain.

24 Wolf Chief to Hayes, Jan. 1881, LRCIA, 3445, and Wolf Chief to Hayes, Feb. 1881, LRCIA, 5545. For insight on the wood industry among people at Fort Berthold, theft by steamboats, and white trespassers cutting wood on the reservation, see Kauffman to CIA, Jan. 14, 1882, LRCIA, 1362; Meyer, Village Indians, 111–112. In their correspondence, Native Americans brought attention to what was called timber trespass: settlers trespassing onto their lands to extract timber.

25 Wolf Chief named three steamers by name, the Yellowstone, the Fontenelle, and the General Terry. Wolf Chief to Garfield, Sept. 1881, LRCIA, 17182; Kauffman to CIA, Oct. 12, 1881, LRCIA, 17182. Most western Natives could not use their timber resources in the ways they wanted.

26 Murphy to CIA, Nov. 16, 1891, LRCIA, 5545; Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 10, 1889, LRCIA, 23002. The commissioner of Indian Affairs replied to Wolf Chief’s 1889 complaint: “it is almost an impossibility to prevent cattle” from “straying over” the reservation boundaries, and that the agent was instructed to “prosecute any person” who did it on purpose, see CIA to Wolf Chief, Sept. 14, 1889, RG 75.4, Letters Sent.

27 Wolf Chief to Courtenay, Feb. 6, 1883, William Courtenay Papers, C1645, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. Courtenay was a former acting agent at Fort Berthold who became a businessman in Bismarck. Wolf Chief kept up correspondence with him and his wife, Fannie, a former Fort Berthold school teacher.

28 Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, Nov. 18, 1880.

29 Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, Jan. 4, 1884. Wolf Chief testified in a territorial court against a white man who stole Fort Berthold horses. See Saint Paul Globe, June 26, 1886.

30 The Independent, Feb. 21, 1884. A student at the Santee Normal Training School in Nebraska, Ernest Hopkins (Arikara) from Fort Berthold, read Wolf Chief’s letter in The Independent, which made him “very glad.” See The Word Carrier (Santee Agency, Nebraska), Apr. 15, 1884.

31 Wolf Chief to CIA, July 17, 1884, LRCIA, 13989.

32 Wolf Chief to Garfield, Dec. 1881, LRCIA, 18388; Wilson Notebook, GWP, vol. 35; Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 158.

33 Wolf Chief to Hayes, Jan. 1881, LRCIA, 3445; Wolf Chief to Hayes, Feb. 1881, LRCIA, 5545. Fort Berthold agent Kauffman was asked by the commissioner of Indian Affairs to explain Wolf Chief’s 1881 letters. Kauffman confirmed that Wolf Chief’s requests were “so common” at Fort Berthold, and that the Indians were “in constant fear of being attacked” by Lakota. Some purported to be Cheyenne River Lakota had recently killed an Arikara man while stealing twenty horses. See Kauffman to CIA, Mar. 24, 1881, LRCIA, 5545; Leonard Love to CIA, Mar. 7, 1881, LRCIA, 7353; Love to CIA, Mar. 31, 1881, LRCIA, 7364; Kauffman to CIA, April 30, 1881, LRCIA, 6569; Kauffman to CIA, May 28, 1881, LRCIA, 9506; Kauffman to CIA, Jan. 21, 1882, LRCIA, 1831. See also Meyer, Village Indians, 131–132. For more on Arikara history, see Mark van de Logt, Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).

34 Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur and CIA, Oct. 7, 1882, LRCIA, 19037. Wolf Chief’s requests for cartridges were not only for self-defense. Hidatsas also needed them for hunting, which supplemented their meager diet.

35 Wolf Chief did not seem to campaign against the idea of the individually-owned, private plots of land that allotment created, so his opinions are unknown, but he still did not trust the promises of the U.S. government when it came to land. See Wolf Chief to CIA, Dec. 1888, LRCIA, 30060; Wolf Chief to CIA, May 18, 1889, LRCIA, 13918; Wolf Chief to James McLaughlin, Aug. 22, 1888, RG 75.19.113, Misc. Rec’d., Box 32, RBIA, NARA-KC; Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 21, 1891, LRCIA, 4820. For information on allotment at Fort Berthold and the immediate consequences, see Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 181–195.

36 In 1886, the Three Tribes were pressured into an agreement to cede 1.6 million acres of the reservation. By 1890–1891, Wolf Chief was still trying to figure out what happened to the money his people were owed as Congress had yet to ratify the 1886 agreement. It was finally ratified in March 1891. See Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 21, 1890, LRCIA, 6439; Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 21, 1891, LRCIA, 4820. See also Thomas Jones to CIA, Sept. 13, 1888, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Murphy, June 10, 1891, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 2, RBIA, NARA-KC.

37 He wrote so much in 1882 that before he went on a lengthy visit to the Crow Reservation, he asked the U.S. president and commissioner to send their letters to him there. See Wolf Chief to CIA and Arthur, May 29, 1882, LRCIA, 10231.

38 Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 10, 1889, LRCIA, 23002.

39 Wolf Chief to Gov. Gilbert Price, Dec. 30, 1885, LRCIA, 1105.

40 Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 10, 1889, LRCIA, 23002.

41 Meyer, Village Indians, 132.

42 Wolf Chief to Price, Dec. 30, 1885, LRCIA, 1105. For background on agent corruption in the 1860s–1870s, see Ryan Hall, “Patterns of Plunder: Corruption and the Failure of the Indian Reservation System, 1851–1887,” Western Historical Quarterly 55 (Spring 2024): 21–38.

43 Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Mar. 4, 1882, LRCIA, 4980; Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Apr. 3, 1882, LRCIA, 6745. Wolf Chief was hired in November 1880, before his letter-writing campaigns began, see Kauffman to CIA, July 8, 1881, LRCIA, 12351. Wolf Chief remembered later in life that Kauffman wanted retribution because Wolf Chief accused him of stealing potatoes meant for the Three Tribes and selling them for personal profit. See Gilbert Wilson Diary, GWP, vol. 35, MHS; Gilman and Schneider, The Way to Independence, 214–215.

44 Wolf Chief to William Courtenay, Dec. 3, 1882, and Wolf Chief, et al. to Courtenay, Feb. 6, 1883, William Courtenay Papers, C1645, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey; Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Mar. 4, 1882, LRCIA, 4980.

45 Wolf Chief to CIA, Apr. 3, 1882, LRCIA, 6859; Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Apr. 3, 1882, LRCIA, 6745.

46 Courtenay to CIA, Feb. 28, 1882, LRCIA, 4544.

47 Mayhugh to Dawes, June 21, 1891, Box 29, Henry L. Dawes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

48 Boston Globe, Feb. 21, 1887.

49 Mayhugh to Dawes, June 21, 1891.

50 “An Indian Letter,” Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, June 1, 1883.

51 Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 10, 1889, LRCIA, 23002.

52 Wolf Chief to Arthur and CIA, Nov. 24, 1884, LRCIA, 22507.

53 Wolf Chief to Cleveland, Mar. 17, 1885, LRCIA, 6513; Wolf Chief to CIA, Jan. 4, 1891, LRCIA, 1535.

54 In 1880, Orange Judd, the prominent editor of the American Agriculturalist, made a report to the Board of Indian Commissioners that criticized the licensing of traders, noting the “absence of competition,” and recommended allowing Indian agents to order supplies and equipment for the Indians, cutting out the trader middlemen. See Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 64–64. For more on Indian traders, see Mario Gonzalez, “Regulation of Indian Traders: A Historical Perspective,” American Indian Law Review 5, no. 2 (1977): 313–342; Robert S. McPherson, Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860–1900: Expansion Through Adversity (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001), 63–78.

55 “An Indian Letter,” Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, June 1, 1883. For more on Plains reservation economies, see Jeffrey Ostler, “‘The Last Buffalo Hunt’ And Beyond: Plains Sioux Economic Strategies in the Early Reservation Period,” Great Plains Quarterly 21 (Spring 2001): 115–130.

56 Bowers, “Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization,” 461.

57 Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur, Mar. 4, 1882, LRCIA, 4980; Wolf Chief to Arthur, Jan. 14, 1882, LRCIA, 1563; Wolf Chief to CIA, Oct. 23, 1882, LRCIA, 19728. Not only did Shaw charge too much for his products, according to Wolf Chief, but he also did not pay enough for the products that Indians brought to him, including wood, deer skins, corn, and oats.

58 Wolf Chief to William Courtenay, Dec. 3, 1882, and Wolf Chief to William Courtenay, Dec. 30, 1882, and Wolf Chief, et al. to Courtenay, Feb. 6, 1883, William Courtenay Papers, C1645, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.

59 Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, Apr. 14, 1882.

60 “Wolf Chief, the Berthold Boomer,” Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, Apr. 28, 1882.

61 “Anti-Monopoly,” Grand Forks (Dakota Territory) Herald, May 2, 1882.

62 Wolf Chief to Southern Workman, Apr. 8, 1882, LRCIA, 7259. Southern Workman did not publish Wolf Chief’s concerns. Hampton superintendent Samuel C. Armstrong simply forwarded the letters to the commissioner of Indian Affairs.

63 Bismarck Tribune also published some of Wolf Chief’s letters sent privately to Bismarck residents.

64 Kauffman to CIA, May 6, 1882, LRCIA, 8925.

65 Wolf Chief to Arthur, May 13, 1882, LRCIA, 9763; Wolf Chief to Arthur, Aug. 1, 1882, LRCIA, 14672; Wolf Chief to Arthur, Aug. 20, 1882, LRCIA, 15864.

66 Kauffman to CIA, Dec. 11, 1882, LRCIA, 22776. Calls for a second store continued into 1886. See Wolf Chief to Arthur and CIA, July 10, 1886, LRCIA, 19034; Wolf Chief to Arthur and CIA, Sept. 3, 1886, LRCIA, 24206. In late 1881, Kauffman admitted to the commissioner that “a few men hold a monopoly in the control of Trading Posts” in “this portion of the Northwest,” but this admission came in a letter of recommendation Kauffman wrote on behalf of his son who was applying to become an Indian trader at the Fort Peck Agency. See Kauffman to CIA, Nov. 7, 1881, LRCIA, 19580.

67 Wolf Chief to Arthur and Secretary of the Interior, Nov. 22, 1884, LRCIA 22919; Wolf Chief, et al. to Arthur and CIA, Nov. 24, 1884, LRCIA, 22507; Wolf Chief, et al. to CIA, Jan. 17, 1885, LRCIA, 8541; Wolf Chief to CIA, Nov. 5, 1885, LRCIA, 26693; Wolf Chief to Arthur and Cleveland, Apr. 13, 1885, LRCIA, 8812; Wolf Chief to Cleveland and CIA, May 19, 1885, LRCIA, 11994.

68 CIA to Gifford, Jan. 20, 1886, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

69 Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 21, 1890, LRCIA, 6439. The new trader, according to Wolf Chief, was actually related to the agent, John Murphy. See Wolf Chief to CIA, May 19, 1890, 16300.

70 May 6, 1890, LRCIA, 15678. Murphy was charged with several improprieties. Others made charges against Murphy when an inspector arrived, including multiple reservation employees.

71 Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 21, 1890, LRCIA, 6439.

72 Wolf Chief to CIA, Mar. 1890, LRCIA, 8999; Murphy to CIA, Feb. 25, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

73 Wolf Chief to CIA, Mar. 1890, LRCIA, 8999.

74 Wolf Chief to CIA, Feb. 17, 1891, LRCIA, 7158.

75 Wolf Chief was buying his goods to resell from George Robinson out of Coal Harbor, North Dakota. Robinson was required to only sell “substantial goods, such as provisions, clothing, etc.” See Murphy to CIA, Feb. 25, 1890, and CIA to Murphy, Aug. 14, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

76 Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 7, 1890, LRCIA, 24872; CIA to Murphy, Aug. 14, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., Box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; Murphy to CIA, Aug. 29, 1890, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Murphy, Sept. 12, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC. The conditions of the rental, according to the commissioner, were: “He is to take proper care of the building. No improper characters are to be allowed to harbor in it. He is to relinquish it to the Government’s agent at any time when called upon to do so.”

77 CIA to Murphy, Oct. 9, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC. In 1891, Murphy accused Wolf Chief of selling those metallic cartridges and “other articles prohibited to be sold to Indian.”

78 “At Fort Berthold,” Bismarck (North Dakota) Weekly Tribune, Oct. 5, 1894.

79 In 2022, a store named “Wolf Chief Store & More” opened in Mandaree on the Fort Berthold Reservation, see West Segment News (Mandaree, North Dakota), July 2022. Following Wolf Chief’s lead, other Native Americans at Fort Berthold opened their own stores in 1889–1890, although persons of mixed ancestry (so-called mixed-bloods) were not allowed to open a store without a license, like a white person. See Murphy to CIA, Apr. 18, 1891, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 2; CIA to Murphy, May 18, 1891, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 2, RBIA, NARA-KC; Murphy to CIA, June 18, 1891, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 2; CIA to Murphy, July 6, 1891, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 2, RBIA, NARA-KC; Murphy to CIA, Feb. 29, 1892, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 2. Charlie Bird (Mandan) purchased Frank Packineau and Wounded Face’s store in 1891, see Murphy to CIA, July 13, 1891, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 2.

80 Tribal nations confronted U.S. power in a great variety of ways to maintain their autonomy, including advocating for policies that might appear assimilationist. For a good example, see David Dry, “Autonomy Through Allotment: Political Strategies of the Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, 1870–1892,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 23 (Oct. 2024): 364–383.

81 Wolf Chief to Teller, Jan. 5, 1884, LRCIA, 919. Fort Berthold agents withheld rations from families who did not send their children to schools, a tactic that the Indian Office supported by the late 1880s.

82 Hartford (Connecticut) Courant, Feb. 23, 1884.

83 Wolf Chief to Arthur and CIA, Feb. 16, 1884, LRCIA, 3887.

84 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1886, 4.

85 Gifford to CIA, Jan. 17, 1885, LRCIA, 8541.

86 Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Feb. 25, 1885; Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune, Feb. 27, 1885.

87 Gifford to CIA, Jan. 17, 1885, LRCIA, 8541.

88 Gifford to CIA, Oct. 11, 1886, LRICA, 27790. Before his time as agent ended, Gifford told the McLean County Mail that it would be “the happiest day of my life when I can bid good-bye to Fort Berthold,” McLean County Mail (Washburn, Dakota Territory), Mar. 24, 1888, quoted in Meyer, Village Indians, 157.

89 Wolf Chief to CIA, Aug. 10, 1889, LRCIA, 23002.

90 A petition with sixty-five signatures was sent out by Wolf Chief, but the commissioner still did not agree. See Wolf Chief, et al. petition to CIA, Oct. 1889, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Murphy, Feb. 19, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

91 Wolf Chief to CIA, Jan. 10, 1890 (copy), RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

92 CIA to Wolf Chief, Mar. 18, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

93 “Specifications for a Day School Frame Building and an Industrial Frame Cottage on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota, 1893, RG 75.19.31, Rec’d, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; Clapp to CIA, July 25, 1893, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC; Clapp to CIA, Nov. 17, 1894, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC.

94 Clapp to Supt., Aug. 27, 1895, RG 75.19.31, Corr. Relating to Schools, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

95 Wolf Chief and Bassett to CIA, Dec. 21, 1889, LRCIA, 37274.

96 CIA to Murphy, Apr. 19, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Murphy, May 17, 1890, RG 75.4, Letters Sent, Accounts; CIA to Murphy, May 24, 1890, RG 75.4, Letters Sent, Accounts. Murphy seems to have successfully argued that George Bassett was “persuaded” by the Congregationalist minister C. L. Hall to make false charges against him because of his Catholicism. It seems unlikely, though, that Rev. Hall could have convinced Wolf Chief, who would not pay any attention to Christianity for another decade, to lie for him along with the victim and two witnesses. Murphy to CIA, May 6, 1891, RG 75.4, Rec’d, 15678, RBIA, NARA-DC.

97 Wolf Chief to CIA, May 19, 1891, RG 75.4, Rec’d, 16300, RBIA, NARA-DC.

98 Bismarck (North Dakota) Weekly Tribune, June 13, 1890; Gifford to Murphy, May 25, 1890, RG 75.19.31, Letters Rec’d, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Murphy, May 31, 1890, RG 75.4, Letters Sent, Accounts; CIA to Murphy, June 14, 1890, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 1.

99 CIA to Murphy, Nov. 4, 1891, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 2, RBIA, NARA-KC.

100 J.L. Davis to Murphy, Jan. 14, 1891, RG 75.19.31, Letters Rec’d, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC; J.L. Davis to Murphy, Jan. 8, 1892, RG 75.19.31, Letters Rec’d, box 1, RBIA, NARA-KC.

101 Murphy to CIA, May 6, 1891, RG 75.4, Rec’d, 15678. In 1893, with Murphy still unpunished, there was an effort made by a former Indian trader to get a U.S. Attorney involved. The acting commissioner of Indian Affairs did not think it was necessary. See CIA to Sec. Int., Mar. 20, 1893. RG 75.4, Letters Sent, Accounts.

102 After a failed attempt to be hired as an allotment agent at Fort Berthold, Murphy was able to convince the new acting agent to hire him back as the agency clerk, but the secretary of the Interior quickly removed Murphy from that role once he heard. See Clap to CIA, July 20, 1893, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Clapp, Jan. 27, 1894, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC; CIA to Clapp, Mar. 13, 1894, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC. See also Meyer, Village Indians, 156–157.

103 Washburn (North Dakota) Leader, Oct. 6, 1894, Oct. 27, 1894, Oct. 31, 1894.

104 Murphy to CIA, Nov. 16, 1891, LRCIA, 42068, quoted in Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 227.

105 ARCIA, 1886, 4.

106 Hall, “Henry Wolf Chief,” 323; Meyer, Village Indians, 202.

107 Murphy to CIA, May 4, 1892, RG 75.19.31, Sent, box 2, NARA-KC; CIA to Clapp, Aug. 18, 1894, RG 75.19.31, CIA Corr., box 3, RBIA, NARA-KC.

108 Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 182.

109 Wolf Chief told an anthropologist in 1916 that he had a vision, years before the move, where he stood on a big stone on top of a hill called Awatahesh, overlooking the river, watching steamboats go by. He found that same spot on the move and built his new community there. See Wilson Field Report, GWP, vol. 20, MHS, 64, quoted in Gilman and Schneider, Way to Independence, 182–183; C. L. Hall, “The Indians,” The American Missionary 1 (Mar. 1896).

110 Bismarck Daily Tribune, Jan. 23, 1901.

111 Goodbird, Goodbird the Indian, 75–77.

112 Bismarck Daily Tribune, June 20, 1904; Bismarck Daily Tribune, Sept. 6, 1906; Wolf Chief to CIA, June 1901, RG 75.4, Rec’d, 31801, RBIA, NARA-DC; Wolf Chief to CIA, Dec. 14, 1905, RG 75.4, Rec’d, 102416, RBIA, NARA-DC.

113 Bismarck Daily Tribune, Jan. 12, 1910.

Figure 0

Figure 1. Wolf Chief mailed this picture of himself to President Chester A. Arthur in 1882. Photograph by Orlando S. Goff, 1878. Enclosed in Wolf Chief to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Oct. 23, 1882, Record Group 75, Letters Rec’d by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Letter 19728, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Destinations of Known Letters Sent by Wolf Chief from the Fort Berthold Reservation, 1881–1891. Boundaries circa 1884. Map by the author.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Fort Berthold Trader’s Store, ca. 1880. Photograph by F. Jay Haynes. Wolf Chief identified himself as the man in the white hat in a letter to President Arthur. See Wolf Chief to Pres. Arthur, Jan. 14, 1882, Record Group 75, Letters Rec’d by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Letter 1563, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, D.C.