Background
Inkpaduta was the son of chief Wamdisapa (Black Eagle). When Inkpaduta was born in present-day southern Minnesota, the Wahpekute, numbering only about 550, ranged out of their main village near present-day Faribault, Minnesota, to hunt and trap. Their conditions were worsened by traditional warfare with the Sauk and Meskwaki to their south and by the disastrous 1837 smallpox epidemic.
As a child, Inkpaduta contracted smallpox, which killed several of his relatives and family members. The disease left him badly scarred for life. After his father was later murdered in a tribal dispute, the band moved to Iowa, near present-day Fort Dodge.
Career
Tasagi, the leading Wahpekute chief, favored ceding tribal lands to the federal government under the abortive 1841 Doty Treaty. Possibly because of tribal contention over the agreement, Tasagi was murdered. Inkpaduta was complicit enough to be forced into exile by Tasagi’s adherents. For the next 16 years, Inkpaduta and his small band hunted, trapped, and foraged in present-day northwestern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and southeastern South Dakota.
Because Inkpaduta did not participate in the 1851 treaties under which the Dakota, Eastern, or Santee Sioux, ceded their lands in Minnesota and Iowa for annual government payments and reservations on the upper Minnesota River, his band had to continue to live off the land. Subsistence became much more difficult as whites began to settle northwest of Fort Dodge. Pioneers’ complaints about begging and stealing by followers of Inkpaduta and Sintomniduta, a brother-in-law of the prominent Sisseton Dakota chief Sleepy Eyes, exacerbated tensions.
Relations deteriorated further after the murder of Sintomniduta by a white ruffian and the government’s abandonment of three-year-old Fort Dodge, in 1853. Threatened with starvation in the cold, snowy winter of 1856–1857, Inkpaduta and his dozen or so men killed some settlers between West Okoboji Lake and East Okoboji Lake on March 8, 1857. Within a few days, they killed 32 settlers. The affair was soon widely publicized as the Spirit Lake Massacre because the entire lake complex was historically identified only as “Spirit Lake.”
While Inkpaduta’s band was escaping to the west, fear of a general Indian uprising gripped the Iowa-Minnesota frontier. Panicky newspaper editors made Inkpaduta an instant villain- ous celebrity. Although Inkpaduta did not play a significant role in Minnesota’s Indian War of 1862, in which some 450 settlers were slain, the government’s failure to apprehend him helped cause it. Some Dakota concluded that the government was incapable of responding to Indian attacks.
The army’s offensive in Minnesota caused hundreds of Dakota to flee into Dakota Territory and Canada. Sympathy for their cause and white incursions during the Montana gold rush caused the Nakota, Middle Sioux, and Lakota, Western or Teton Sioux, to expand hostilities. When the federal government sent several thousand troops into Dakota Territory, Inkpaduta and his band were living with the Yanktonai, a branch of the Nakota. Inkpaduta participated in Sioux defeats at White Stone Hill (September 3, 1863) and Killdeer Mountain (July 28, 1864).
After the Killdeer Mountain setback, Inkpaduta became associated with Sitting Bull, prominent medicine man of the Hunkpapa Lakota. Inkpaduta was involved in the Lakota resistance to white advances in the upper Missouri country for over a decade before the epochal Great Sioux War of 1876. During that conflict, he was at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in which Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led the annihilation of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 220-man command. The aged and blind Inkpaduta did not participate in the fighting, but two of his sons distinguished themselves. After the battle, Inkpaduta fled to Canada. He died several years later in the vicinity of present-day Brandon, Manitoba.
Personality
Although early white historians portrayed Inkpaduta as the devil incarnate for the Spirit Lake Massacre, his reputation has been somewhat resurrected by recent historical reinterpretation that places more emphasis on his uncompromising resistance to the white takeover of Indian lands.
