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Mapping Indigenous Land Dispossession

This module is designed to be used together with several others. It is centered around an interactive map, which provides links to public land surveys and the General Land Office Database. Within part of Sawyer County in northern Wisconsin, the map has additional layers that allow students to trace land ownership, from university Morrill Act land grants to logging companies to National Forests or vacation homes today, for example. The map can also be used to visualize late 19th to early 20th dispossession of land of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band through allotment and development of Lake Chippewa. This guide is organized by the other modules the interactive map and other material here can be integrated with.

Note: At the end of this guide there are suggestions for completing the assignments here without using the interactive map.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Through use of the material here in combination with other modules, students will:

  • Understand how the public land survey and public land laws were used to impose a system of private property on landscapes of what is now Wisconsin
  • Visualize and better understand the impacts of land cession treaties and public land laws (the Homestead Act and Morrill Act, for example) on Indigenous lands and resources and on the present-day map of Wisconsin.
  • Visualize and better understand the impacts of allotment and dam construction on Native lands and resources in Wisconsin

There are many possible ways of integrating the interactive map and other material here into teaching on Indigenous land dispossession and related issues. The following sections are intended as suggestions.

USING MATERIAL IN THIS MODULE WITH LAND TENURE AND PRIVATIZATION

After working through the module on Land Tenure and Privatization, students can then explore how the public land survey and the land sales that followed turned the land of what is now Wisconsin into private property. Assignment, best done in class to help students interpret what they are seeing:

  1. Read Background on the Public Land Survey and How to Use the Land Survey Notes, as well as this dissertation chapter by Liz Kozik. For additional information on conducting land history, view “Prairie, Land Expropriation, and Treaty Research” PowerPoint. 
  2. Read the instructions for the interactive map, and then open the map. Navigate to some part of Wisconsin you are interested in and zoom in. Try different background maps; the USGS Topo Map layer shows the topography and the USGS Satellite  layer will let you see where there are forests, farmland, or towns and cities. Note the green grid lines of the Public Land Survey System, running across the landscape with no relation to topography or streams. Notice how roads and the boundaries of farm fields often follow the grid lines, because they are property lines today.
  3. Click on a location in your area of interest. A popup will include a link to “township PLSS notes”, that is, to notes the public land surveyors recorded as they crossed the landscape creating the land survey grid. Follow the link, and using the instructions for these notes, try to read and interpret them. They can be hard to read! Try somewhere else if needed; some surveyors had more readable handwriting than others. They may note trails, mounds, or other features, recording the presence of Indigenous people, in the recent past or at the time of the survey. What do they say about the landscape? Is it “rolling prairie” or “scattering oaks”? Note that the surveyors give a rating of the land for agriculture (“2nd rate” for example), an indication of the many settlers waiting to acquire the land for farming once it was “made into property” by the land surveyors and the public land laws.
  4. Now read Background on the General Land Office Database and Instructions for Using It. Click again on your area of interest, and this time follow the link for “township land patents,” taking you to records of land patents in the GLO database for that area. Using the instructions for interpreting land patents, take a look at who bought land from the government in the earliest years of land sales there. Do you see a few names appearing repeatedly? These are probably land speculators who bought up large areas of land and sold it to later settlers at a profit. In northern Wisconsin, they may be so-called “timber barons” who bought up land solely for the purpose of logging it. You can often find something about speculators and timber barons by doing searches on their names. Try James Doty or Frederick Weyerhaueser for example. Later land patents will often record sales to people who bought smaller quantities of land. These are mostly settlers moving to Wisconsin from the eastern US or Europe who intended to establish farms. There were many ways to profit from these lands once they were made into private property.

USING MATERIAL IN THIS MODULE WITH THE 1862 MOMENT

After working through the module on The 1862 Moment, students can then explore records of the General Land Office to find examples of how land was sold under the land laws from that year (and other earlier and later laws) in areas of Wisconsin they are interested in. Assignment, best done in class to help students interpret what they are seeing:

  1. Read Background on the General Land Office Database and Instructions for Using It.
  2. Read the instructions for the interactive map, and then open the map. Navigate to some part of Wisconsin you are interested in and zoom in. Try different background maps to get an idea of the landscape in the area you have chosen to study. Click on a location in your area of interest, and follow the link for “township land patents,” taking you to records of land patents in the GLO database for that area. Using the instructions for interpreting land patents, sort the list of patents by date and take a look at some of the earlier ones.
  3. Open some patents by following links under “Accession”.  The land law that applied to each of these land sales is listed under “Authority.” In northern Wisconsin you may find many parcels of land sold under “July 2, 1862: State Grant Agri-College” which is the Morrill Act. If so, see who/what is listed as the buyer. There will always be one or more people listed as buyers, but you may also see the name of the university that benefited from this land sale (in the next step we’ll explore Morrill Act parcels in more detail). You may also find examples of land bought under the Homestead Act. In southern Wisconsin, you will find land sales mostly under authority of laws that predated the 1862 moment.
  4. Now navigate back to the area of Sawyer County that was centered when you first opened the interactive map (or just reload the map). If needed, review in the instructions the different layers you can add or remove from it. Pick a township where there are plat maps and most of the land is not within the Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation. Possibilities include T37N R6W, T37N R7W, T39N R7W (southeastern part), T40N R5W, T40N R6W, and T40E R7W. In that township, work through the following steps:
    1. Morrill Act Parcels. If needed, review the High Country News article on the Morrill Act, Land Grab Universities. Start by turning on the Morrill Act Parcels layer. You should see blue rectangles corresponding to parcels of land that were bought from the federal government under the authority of the Morrill Act. Specifically, states received the right to sell certain amounts of scrip, paper that could be exchanged for public land in any state where land was still available. The money each state received from selling Morrill Act scrip supported the establishment of land grant universities like UW Madison. So, each blue rectangle displayed in Sawyer County is a piece of land acquired by someone who bought Morrill Act scrip from a state. In some other counties of Wisconsin there are also Morrill Act parcels given directly to the state of Wisconsin by the federal government, which were then sold to private owners, but there are none of these in Sawyer County. Are there Morrill Act parcels in your township? Pick three to look at. If there are not three in your township, find the nearest ones in other townships. If you click in the blue rectangle for a parcel, you will get a popup showing which university benefited. You may be surprised to find universities from across the eastern, midwestern, and southern US. The popup also shows what the US government paid to the Native Nation that ceded that land, and how much the land grant university involved received in funding when the scrip was sold.
    2. Land purchases from the US government. You will need to turn off the Morrill Act Parcel layer and make sure the PLSS Grid layer is turned on. If it is, you will seen a grid of green lines. Click on the map anywhere in the township you’re working on in Sawyer County to get a link to land patents on that township. As you did in step 2, sort these by date from earliest to latest. Look through the earliest patents, probably two or three pages in the database list. Do you see the same person or group of people buying a lot of land (many patents) early on? In northern Wisconsin, it’s very likely that those early land-buyers who show up on many patents were timber barons or land speculators who bought land with good white pine timber to sell to logging companies. Do a search online using some of the names you see frequently, to check if you can find connections to the timber industry or the land business. Use the person’s full name if possible. Obituaries often turn up, and they are good sources of information. You’re likely to find at least one or two people in the timber or land business buying lots of land in your township. Finally, for patents involving those frequent buyers, check the Accession column. Anything there starting with AGS- tells you this is land bought with Morrill Act scrip. How much of the land bought through the Morrill Act was clearly purchased by people in the timber or land business?
    3. Later changes in land ownership. Now start turning on the Plat Maps for your township, starting with the oldest (1897) and ending with the most recent (1957). These are maps of landownership at the time of the map, with the owners’ names written inside the parcels they owned. On the oldest plat map, see if you can identify some land parcels owned by logging companies (look for company names including “lumber,” “timber,” “logging,” etc.). If you can’t find any clear examples, look for names of individuals or companies that owned a large amount of land in the township, even if you can’t clearly connect them to logging. Then, as you turn on later plat maps, trace the changes in ownership of those same parcels. It should be possible to keep track of them by their position in the township and by the numbers labeling 1-square-mile sections. Keep an eye out for land that has become public land by 1957 (labeled Sawyer County, State of Wisconsin, USA or US Forest Service, for example). There will be a lot of this or almost none, depending on the township you chose. Also watch for land that at some point belonged to a “colonization company.” These were companies that bought land at low prices from loggers who had cut all the valuable timber there, and then sold that land at a profit to people who wanted to settle and establish farms in the Cutover. Dean Harry Russell of the UW Madison Agriculture College was heavily invested in one of these companies. Only some townships have land that was once owned by a colonization company. Finally, check present-day (2023) ownership using the Property Parcels layer. You will need to turn that layer on and click on parcels outline by the red-brown lines within your township. The name(s) of owners will appear in a popup.

USING MATERIAL IN THIS MODULE WITH DAMS AS DISPOSSESSION

After working through the module on Dams and Dispossession, students can then explore plat maps from the area of the Lake Chippewa Flowage to better understand the land dispossession associated with that water project and many others.  Assignment, best done in class to help students interpret what they are seeing:

  1. Read the instructions for the interactive map, and then open the map. Navigate to one of the townships where Lake Chippewa is located (T40N R7W and T40N R6W are the best choices; you can find them quickly by turning on one of their plat map layers) . Open first the 1897 Plat Map layer for the township you chose. On this map you can see the channel of the Chippewa River as it was in 1897. Now study property ownership as indicated by labels on parcels of land on this plat map. Areas outlined with a heavy line and labeled “Indian Reservation” mark land within the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation at that time. This land was held “in trust” for the Lac Courte Oreilles Band by the US government, a legal framework that has been a major obstacle to tribal sovereignty, but the LCO Band does exercise sovereignty over the remaining trust land today, with implications for resource use, hunting and fishing, and law enforcement among other things. Carefully note where this land was located around the Chippewa River in 1892, within the township you are studying. Also take notes on other property owners in the township in 1897.  Now open the ca1925 Plat Map (closing the 1897 Plat Map to make it visible). Make the same kinds of observations on this map, which also precedes the formation of the Lake Chippewa Flowage.
  2. Turn off the ca1925 Plat Map and turn on the 1957 Plat Map for your township. The Lake Chippewa Flowage will be visible on the 1957 map (and on the base maps as well). Look at land ownership around the lake in 1957, and compare it to what you saw on the 1897 and ca1925 maps, moving back and forth between the 1957 map and the older ones if needed. Do you see evidence of land lost by the LCO Band? Which property owners have probably gained from the damming of the river and formation of the flowage? Relate your observations to the readings and videos in the Dams as Dispossesion module.
  3. A more open-ended question: Do you have other observations on these maps that you can relate to material covered in the Dams as Dispossession module? If so, describe them.

USING MATERIAL IN THIS MODULE TO UNDERSTAND DISPOSSESSION THROUGH ALLOTMENT

Much of the dispossession of the lands of Native Nations in Wisconsin occurred through forced land cession treaties (see Basic Concepts module). However, another mechanism of dispossession was enabled by the Dawes Act, passed by the US Congress in 1887. Under this act and later legislation covering specific reservations, tribal land held “in trust” was divided into parcels that were then allotted to tribal members as private  property. The remaining land within reservation boundaries was then opened for sale (or Homestead Act grants) to non-Native settlers, who also often acquired allotments. Total land loss through allotment following the Dawes Act is estimated at 90 million acres across the US. Assignment:

  1. Read this excellent, detailed history of allotment by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. The section on History of Allotment is most important, but read through at least some of the cases described in Historical Allotment Legislation to get a sense of the paternalistic language used by Congress and US government officials and how that contrasts with the reality of dispossession. For a Wisconsin case, read this book chapter by Cornelius and Metoxen on the impacts of allotment on the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and how those impacts were connected with environmental change in the area of the Oneida Reservation near Green Bay.
  2. Read the instructions for the interactive map, and then open the map. When it opens, Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation should be visible on the base map. It may also worth turning on the 1897 plat maps for T39N R8W, T39N R7W, T40N R7W, and/or T40N R6W; these will show the reservation area as defined at that time, clearly labeled.
  3. Review the Background on the General Land Office Database and Instructions for Using It, if needed. You can now find allotment patents on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation with the following steps: Click on the interactive map with the PLSS Grid layer displayed, which will bring up a popup including a “link to township land patents” (i.e. the General Land Office database) for that Township and Range. Follow the link, then sort the patents by year and start looking through them, exactly as described in the General Land Office database instructions.  Identify two or three patents that are clearly for allotments (usually but not always labeled IA-, more importantly, they will list “February 8, 1887: Indian Allotment” as the Authority when you open them to look at the details).
  4. Going back to the interactive map, turn on the 1957 plat maps for the Township and Range you are looking at. Look for land parcels where the owner listed on the plat map is definitely or probably not a tribal member, not using personal names, but by looking for lumber or paper company owners, or Sawyer County as the owner. Check the 1897 plat map for the same area to confirm these two or three parcels were not private (or county-owned) land in 1897, but were part of tribal lands within the reservation boundary. Think about what this means: These are very likely to be lands that were allotted, but then sold to a non-tribal member or company, or forfeited to the county because the allottee couldn’t afford to pay property taxes on it. These were very common processes of land loss that followed allotment. As discussed in the reading on the Dawes Act, this is how millions of acres of tribal lands were lost, mostly in the early 1900s. Finally, turn on the 2023 Parcel Map layer and click on the two or three parcels you are working on to find out their present owners. You may be surprised to find that some are now owned by the LCO (Lac Courte Oreilles) Band, or by the USA “in trust” [for the Tribal Nation]. If so, this is probably an example of recent efforts by many Tribal Nations to reclaim lands lost through allotment, for example by buying them back (think about the injustice of having to buy back land that was stolen). (Note: The ca.1924 plat maps are not much use for this step; they don’t seem to show allotted land within the reservation in most cases, even though allotment happened well before 1924.)
  5. Using the readings on allotment as background, reflect on how allotment under the Dawes Act might have affected the lives and livelihoods of the Native people living in the township you looked at, and impacts it may still have today.

SUGGESTIONS FOR COMPLETING THESE ASSIGNMENTS WITHOUT THE INTERACTIVE MAP

The key step for studying Public Land Survey notes and General Land Office records without the interactive map is to find the location of your area of interest within the Public Land Survey System. One way to do this is through this handy PLSS Locator page from the State Cartographer’s Office. With that information, Public Land Survey and General Land Office records can be accessed by methods described in Background on the Public Land Survey and How to Use the Land Survey Notes and Background on the General Land Office Database and Instructions for Using It.

The Additional Resources page in this module includes: 1) Plat maps of various ages for several northern Wisconsin counties for further exploration, and 2) guides to accessing land records

 

The development of these materials was supported through a Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.