Winnebagoes took heart at hearing it. They are said to have “settled down quietly and contentedly,” and have gone to work immediately, “ploughing, planting, and building.”
The citizens of Minnesota did not take kindly to their new neighbors. “An indignation meeting was held; a petition to the President signed; and movements made, the object of all which was to oust these Indians from their dearly-purchased homes,” says the Report of the Indian Commissioner for 1855.
Such movements, and such a public sentiment on the part of the population surrounding them, certainly did not tend to encourage the Winnebagoes to industry, or to give them any very sanguine hopes of being long permitted to remain in their “permanent home.” Nevertheless they worked on, doing better and better every year, keeping good faith with the whites and with the Government, and trusting in the Government's purpose and power to keep faith with them. The only serious faults with which they could be charged were drunkenness and gambling, and both of these they had learned of the white settlers. In the latter they had proved to be apt scholars, often beating professional gamblers at their own game.
They showed the bad effects of their repeated removals, also, in being disposed to wander back to their old homes. Sometimes several hundred of them would be roaming about in Wisconsin. But the tribe, as a whole, were industrious, quiet, always peaceable and loyal, and steadily improving. They took hold in earnest of the hard work of farming; some of them who could not get either horses or ploughs actually breaking up new land with hoes, and getting fair crops out of it. Very soon they began to entreat to have their farms settled on them individually, and guaranteed to them for their own; and the Government, taking advantage of this desire on their part, made a treaty with them in 1859, by which part of their lands were to be “allotted” to individuals in “severalty,” as they had requested, and the rest were to be sold, the
